Massachusetts needs its own party: A Progressive State Sovereigntist Manifesto

In the autumn of 2020, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is confronting a complex of crises.  We are in the midst of a recovery from a pandemic against which it is uncertain when or how we will reach a sufficient threshold of control or mass immunity to resume regular economic activity.  We are facing the newest stage of a long term reckoning with racial inequality and the use of violence against African-Americans by police, in the Commonwealth as much as in every corner of the United States.  We are suffering an economic downturn whose severity is greater than any previous recession since the 1930s, including the "Great" recession of 2007-2009.  We are struggling, against the resistance of a substantial body of our countrymen and their elected representatives, to reconfigure our economy in response to the long term imperative of climate change.  And we are facing a federal administration that has evoked contempt for the democratic process, for the rule of law, for our broader Constitutional legacy, for our heritage as a haven for dispossessed humanity, for collaborative and multilateral diplomacy, and, finally and most insidiously, for the institutions of federalism and the freedom of the states to exercise their police powers at their discretion.  

Against a President who is dispatching federal law enforcement officers into American cities without either request or permission of state and local governments, we have tied our best hopes for resistance to the national Democratic Party.  For at least three generations, aside from our recurring propensity to elect Republican governors, this Commonwealth has continuously relied on the Democratic Party to articulate and represent our partisan interests in the formation and execution of both domestic and foreign policy, in Boston and in Washington.  In bluer than blue Massachusetts, we can count the number of Republican state senators in the General Court of the Commonwealth on two hands without ever having to remove our shoes and socks!  The national Democratic Party has been the standard bearer of all our best, liberal partisan sentiments, in support of a moderate but active government, engaged in the creation of capitalism with a socially responsible, human face, in the need to mitigate the worst effects of ecological catastrophe, and in the imperative to defend the rights of marginalized populations at home and oppressed populations abroad.  Until recently, it has achieved its promise by means of compromise.  Against the relatively libertarian and conservative impulses of the national Republican Party that emerged with Reagan, the national Democratic Party has succeeded in making small gains, restraining some of the worst excesses of private capitalism, preventing the wholesale privatization of the New Deal/Great Society institutions, seeking achievable protections of clean air, clean water, and reduction of carbon emissions, reminding a nation of the unfulfilled promises of a long struggle for racial equality, and working for international multilateralism in the interest of maintaining peace and fostering international economic development, even if under the dominion of global finance.  They have sought moderate and achievable reforms, and they have championed the hope that the many corners of the broad American cultural landscape could be brought together to weave an inclusive and pluralistic multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-sect, and multi-regional liberal democracy, embodying the promises of our Constitution of 1787, "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."  They have, for almost a century since the beginnings of the New Deal, struggled to articulate and expand a practical vision of governance that would encompass our evolving conceptions of justice, empathy, and compassion and situate such an ethic within the evolving course of our collective national history to make it uniquely and defiantly American.

In 2020, however, it is clear that we have entered an entirely new period in American history.  Nor has this moment arisen instantaneously; it is the product of a longer process with certain strands extending back to 1787.  The nation that emerged as an outcome of our Constitutional convention had not resolved the institution of slavery and the underlying dynamics of racialism that enabled one segment of humanity to reduce another to mere property on the grounds of its supposed innate inferiority.  The cumulative weight of our historical original sin has never abated.  It did not end with the abolition of slavery in the 1860s or with the abolition of Jim Crow in the 1960s, and it will not end now with the Black Lives Matter movement and its defense of the humanity of George Floyd.  Racism not only colors our politics, law enforcement, and criminal justice policies, but it shapes the economics of American capitalism, finance, housing markets, educational access and attainment, health care, transportation, and environmental degradation.  

   

In 2008, many corners of public opinion, especially in liberal Massachusetts, embraced the hope and the possibility that the country was turning a corner in the history of race in America, having elected the nation's first black president.  In fact, it was the beginning of a conservative backlash and a permanent crisis in governance at the federal level.  The 2010 mid-term elections gave rise to the Tea Party movement and its conversion of the federal legislative and fiscal managerial process into a stymied partisan mess.  In place of annual budget resolutions and compromises of will and priorities, both parties in Congress now consign themselves to continuing resolutions, recurring government shutdowns, and forced sequestration.  It would be an unfair oversimplification to reduce the breakdown of legislative leadership in Congress to racial politics, but, on a more elemental level, the cultural and electoral dynamics that have propelled national Republican candidates since the Tea Party revolt have focused on the deterioration and impending eclipse of a white, rural electoral majority and the perception that any capture of the apparatus of federal legislative and administrative power by the Democratic Party coalition would result in radical socialistic initiatives and challenges to the individual rights of American citizens, breaking down economic liberty and posing the specter of police raids to seize the weapons of law abiding gun owners.  It is noteworthy that the grassroots activists of the Obama era Tea Party movement made an effort to obscure or otherwise deny any racialist sentiments in their appeals for smaller government and lower taxes, but at their core was a virulent animus of "us versus them," a sentiment prefigured on the perceived presence of a parasitic, undeserving black and brown other that stood ultimately to benefit from a long term demographic transformation of the American electorate, displacing our original white majority and recentering the geographic bases of partisan power from the rural heartlands of the great middle to the urban centers of the coasts.  For a great many Republican voters, Reagan's "morning in America" had given way to the permanent twilight of an America they could no longer recognize as their own.

In Trump, this vicious and critically racist axis of conflict in American political life has reached its apogee.  A broad minority of the American populace across many states has formed the core of a coalition determined to capture the federal government to perpetuate the partisan dominance of the white, rural, conservative electorate.  Some members of this electorate live right here among us in the Commonwealth, and some of them we even count as friends and relatives with whom we, sadly or fortunately, can no longer discuss politics.  For a generation, this segment of the electorate and its representatives in the national and state Republican Parties have struggled against the force of demographics by means of gerrymandering and juridical challenges to voting rights to consolidate and strengthen its power in its own regional strongholds while rendering the marginalized powerless.  Since Trump's election, they have reveled in the capturing of a large segment of the federal judiciary at the circuit court level and the strengthening a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court.  They have applauded the undermining of a capacity for coherent administration of numerous federal bureaus through Trump's war against the "deep state" of qualified professional policymakers.  In the place of loyal professional civil servants, they find devil worshipers lurking in the shadows of federal bureaucracy sowing chaos in the same way that earlier generations saw communists hiding in the dark corridors of the Pentagon.  They cheered the death of conservation and ecology as a virtue embraced by previous generations of the Republican Party, replaced by the expedited leasing of protected federal lands for hydrocarbon extraction and construction of pipelines to supply dirty and ecologically devastating Canadian tar sands to the American market.  They applauded the imagery of immigration raids against industries dependent on low wage brown migrant labor and excused an administration that intentionally practiced the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border on the grounds that the emotional trauma it would generate might dissuade desperate people fleeing poverty and violence from attempting to forge a better life in America.  They sneer at the thought of crowded immigration detention facilities on the southern border ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, bereft of adequate medical capacity to mitigate death rates.  After all, they assert, if a nation can't protect its own borders, even from the most poor and most vulnerable of asylum seekers, than it would cease to exist as a nation.  Most importantly, they have courted a deeper affinity for authoritarianism.  Against the very legislative gridlock that their representatives facilitated during the Obama years, they yearned for a dictator who would rule by fiat and, by his hand, "drain the swamp" of corruption and special interests characterizing democratic governance and the culture of compromise in Washington.  They sympathized with Trump's own embrace of authoritarian adversaries like Putin and Kim on the global stage, because, after all, they found something innately appealing in the image of leaders who could get something done and not find themselves continuously subject to the imperative of working faithfully to reach a consensus with a loyal opposition.  With Trump, they turned a blind eye to extremists who believed in international Jewish conspiracies to destroy western civilization and who brazenly committed murder in name of perpetual white supremacy.  And, hypocritically, against their own long history of conflict to defend the sovereign rights of states to manage their own internal affairs from encroaching federal authority, they cheered the intervention by Trump to police protesters in states where Democratic Party officials extended to the federal government no invitation to intervene on their behalf.  They indulged in the same fantasies, once promulgated by such hypocritical right-wing state sovereigntist American ideologues as George Wallace, to bring the revolts of marginalized black and brown people in the big cities to submission at the end of a bayonet.  And now, faced with the possibility of a disputed presidential election, they await the order from their commander-in-chief to storm the polling places and impede the full counting of ballots if their man's electoral prospects are threatened.        

Today, they protest any obligation to wear masks in public against the spread of COVID-19, while the virus spreads like wildfire across regions with inadequate hospital intensive care capacities, inflicting tens of thousands of American dead, victims of a disease public health authorities are unable to control, in large part, because our reactionary countrymen do not believe in science and will not defer to the advisement of immunological experts.  Instead they look for conspiracies and scapegoats, threaten the lives of government authorities when these civil servants invoke prophylactic restrictions on economic activity, and languish in the expanding breakdown of a national community, incapable of embracing the smallest measure of solidarity with their countrymen in the face of a crisis to the extent that it threatens their undiminished individual liberties.  With Trump, they keep waiting to turn a corner and arrive at the old normal, absent any will to sacrifice or sympathy for populations ravaged disproportionately by the virus.  Similarly, in the face of every new incident of police violence against African-Americans, they bemoan the demands for change made by populations that they scarcely regard as fellow human beings, much less their own countrymen.  They await the end of a Civil Rights movement that never seems to abate so that they can go back to espousing all of their old prejudices without the encumbrance of white guilt enforced by the liberal media, to whom they've stopped listening anyway.  When, confronted both by the specter of viral death and the endless repetition of violence by police, those marginalized populations have arisen, our reactionary countrymen urge Trump to call in the military and restore law and order to the cities.  

Against the capture of the national Republican Party by such an increasingly reactionary minority with its innate preferences for authoritarianism and barely disguised racialism, the national Democratic Party has sought to pursue the partisan middle ground, privilege moderation, imagine that compromise and consensus remains an attainable goal of the democratic process, and offer to its more progressive flank the suggestion that they should lower their voice in polite company.  With this in mind, it is worth asking what good the national Democratic Party is in supporting nominally progressive ideals in the formulation and enactment of federal policy if it is unwilling to engage combatively to achieve these ends, supported by a broad segment of the national electorate if not a majority, in the present hyper-partisan environment of Washington.  The national Republican Party, by contrast, made it eminently clear that it is willing to jettison the requirements of the Constitution of 1787 to continuously maintain the power of its reactionary constituency.  In 2016, Republican Senate Majority leadership made it clear that they would not even consider the Constitutionally sanctified nomination of a Supreme Court justice by Obama, eleven months before leaving office, because the approval of such a nomination would alter the balance of power on the Court to the detriment of their constituencies.  Today, Congressional Republicans are poised to enable the Trump administration to undertake a Constitutionally mandated national census that will, both by design and by coincidental effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, significantly under-count existing state populations in such a manner that may achieve a tectonic shift in political power and federal funding of state and local jurisdictions for at least the forthcoming decade.  They have, likewise, allowed Trump to make changes to the administration of the US Postal Service that will make it more difficult, in the course of a pandemic transmitted through person-to-person respiratory aerosol contact, to operate federal general elections largely through the medium of mail-in ballots.  The national Democratic Party has proven itself largely useless in minimally defending the requirements of the Constitution of 1787 against the best efforts of Republicans to bend them or dispense with them entirely for their own purposes.  Against the Republican Party's reactionary electorate, with its embrace of state violence, contempt for the democratic process, and propensity to place its faith in the hands of ideologues like Trump, our Commonwealth is being rendered defenseless in the wake of a fascist transformation of American political life.    

We have arrived at this moment, in part, because the evolution of our Constitutional order has failed to keep pace with that of communications media.  The authors of the Constitution of 1787 constructed a government in which they hoped to invest overarching power in the hands of a learned and rational elite through the office of President and through the counterbalancing power of the Senate, insulating the privileges of this elite from the potential radicalism of direct democracy and mob rule.  By means of the electoral college, the election of Presidents was destined to remain a step removed from the absolute power of majoritarian democracy.  Senators were originally destined to be elected exclusively through state legislatures, conforming to expectations regarding an institution that was to demonstrably ensure the sovereignty of each state, large and small, through equal representation.  We have amended our original Constitutional institutions piecemeal through the Article V process to incrementally break down the anti-democratic bias of Madison, Hamilton, and their generation, but we are still confronted with a patchwork of the Founders' anti-democratic safeguards, and these lingering vestiges remain to be exploited by unprincipled elites to foment partisan factionalism against the will of a national democratic majority.  In tandem, the vast, if uneven and constrained, expansion of communications media through information technology has promoted an unparalleled profusion of highly partisan voices, shaped, in turn, by the financial support of elites, bolstering especially the number of voices emanating from the political right.  Online social networks diffuse vast quantities of highly charged partisan information to privileged audiences, sorted by complex algorithms, to contort individual imageries of reality and impede the fragile coalescing of a national political community in the face of multiple, convergent crises.  Filtered through myriad competing and incommensurable images of reality, our amended but still antiquated Constitutional institutions of democratic choice have produced a vacuum of perpetual indecision, partisan wrangling, interest group manipulation, rent seeking by financial elites, and cynical, authoritarian power grabs by faithless and self-centered, if incompetent, demagogues.  As much as in 1860, we are being confronted with the failure of Madison and Hamilton's Constitutional system. 

We cannot return to a reality not inflected by the presence of diverse, radically partisan media instruments, aimed fundamentally at exploiting divisions within the U.S. population in order to nurture deeper ruptures in the unity of the American populace.  To argue that FoxNews or Facebook is the singular source undermining our ability to carry on rational and informed debates of critical policy issues radically and unrealistically simplifies the depth of the problem introduced by contemporary digital media platforms.  In the end, our divisions already existed to be exploited before otherwise innocuous technologies created the potential to broadcast hateful and divisive messages to privileged segments of our population most receptive to their appeal.  The Trump electorate was mobilized in 2016 because it existed to be mobilized however much technologies facilitated this mobilization.  No outcome of the 2020 general election, moreover, can write out of history a segment of the national American electorate that continues to feel marginalized and that would willingly submit the country to either authoritarian tyranny or to civil war in a futile quest to rediscover some foregone American greatness, defined in contradiction to the ideals and policies of its partisan opponents.  Similarly, no master narrative of big tent partisan unity among the national Democrats will erase the immense and valid insurgency of progressives on the party's left.  A vast and diverse subset of young Americans in the left wing of the Democratic Party will remain unsatisfied with any outcome of the 2020 general election.     

Truthfully, at this moment in American history, we are confronting the culmination of over two hundred years of partisan divisions, etched out onto the geographic landscapes of an evolving nation and shaped preeminently in all of its dimensions by racialized fear and antagonism, against which the two national parties have opted to embrace contradictory strategies.  The national Republican Party under Trump has doubled-down on perpetual white supremacy and the political domination of rural constituencies and parochial, ethno-nationalist cultures over racial equality, cultural diversity, and the globalist liberalism of the cities.  By contrast, the national Democratic Party, rather than concede that we are already engaged in a new ideological civil war to decide the political, economic, and cultural future of the United States, continues to cling to the backward looking hope of forging a new unity and bipartisan consensus that can save the country from its current crises.  They dust off old moderates from previous eras in the hope of  uniting the cities and the suburbs, court wistful memories of past compromises, and intently urge their left wing to wait patiently for some time in the not too distant future when the work of the present will create a foundation for more radical reform agendas.  This vision is untenable.  A Constitutional structure that empowers electoral minorities to capture the apparatus of federal administration, the judiciary, and legislative capacity and to wield it to the disadvantage of democratic majorities at a moment when decisive responses to critical issues are needed negates the very vitality of the system the Founders created.  In Massachusetts, we cannot keep looking backward with the Democrats and hope that a broken Constitutional system will enable us to achieve the broader agendas needed to address the COVID-19 crisis, climate change, persistent racial inequalities, and the long term transition of our local and global economic structures around present and future needs.  We need to move in a different direction.   

Our Commonwealth resides in a big country.  The diversity of political views that we hold among ourselves in Massachusetts are dwarfed by our differences in partisan viewpoints with our countrymen in places like Texas and Montana and Utah.  Over the longer course of our collective history since the passage of the Constitution of 1787, we have not always presumed that, as a country, we could or should think and act as one.  As we emerged from the previous, confederate system of the Articles of Confederation, the supporters of a stronger federal government conveyed an alternative that would reduce the likelihood of conflict between our independent and sovereign states and simultaneously preserve the safety of each state from foreign invasion without subsequently abolishing the integrity of each constituent sovereign unit.  In our new Constitution, the state governments were to have retained a degree of preeminence and a margin of sovereign authority over their own affairs, acknowledging the fundamental differences of each of the states, politically, culturally, and economically.  The Founders never presumed that their Constitution would abolish either the formal institutions of state government or the cultural distinctiveness of each state.  If the course of our collective history has had the tendency of obliterating distinctions between citizens of each state in favor of a broader concept of American citizenship, then the many practical dimensions of our differences have never ceased to be pertinent.  However much Presidential candidates vie to stand as trustees of the executive authority for all American citizens, in reality the winner has become a trustee to the will either of citizens from the Red states or from the Blue states, against whom supporters of the opposition feel aggrieved and wronged.  Too many of us now engage in the petty and pointless retort that "he's not MY President."

In 2020, we need to acknowledge this reality.  As a country, the United States has become too big and too diverse to maintain a robust conception of united governance and to foster a strong ideal of common national citizenship.  If the promise of federalism enshrined by the Founders in the Constitution of 1787 was to have been upheld, then we would not anxiously await the enunciation of a new federal strategy against COVID-19, the development of a federal plan to combat climate change, a federal investigation of police violence against African-Americans in Minnesota or Wisconsin or Kentucky, a plan to rescue federal Social Security income supports for retirees as the collective population of the United States ages, a federal legislative agenda to lower health care and pharmaceutical costs across the United States, a federal policy to protect and promote the voting rights of disenfranchised groups in numerous states and local jurisdictions, or a discussion on the broader fiscal health of the federal government inclusive of supports for foundering, pandemic ravaged state governmental budgets.  If the states were truly as sovereign as the Founders would have had, then we would be able to call forth the resources to maintain our fiscal budgets through an economic and epidemiological crisis, however painfully, without begging for help from the federal government.  If the federal government assumed the relative dimensions assigned to them by the Founders through their Constitution, then no one would be waiting for the federal government to formulate a wide range of domestic agendas because it would have been too small, too ill financed, and too marginal to the day-to-day matters of governance to resolve such issues.  The Founders would have had a federal government that was largely irrelevant to the day-to-day lives of American citizens in relation to the omnipresent centrality of the states.  The course of our collective history has rendered this federalist construction a relic of our distant pre-New Deal if not our Antebellum past.  The past crises of our collective history have contorted our Constitutional structure in ways that currently leave us incapable of exercising coherent and consensual democratic self-governance on a national scale.  The maintenance of such a structure is not only luxuriantly and wastefully expensive in terms of the taxes levied on our citizens and the burden of debt servicing extended into the indefinite future but also in terms of the forgone opportunities to realize decisive solutions to serious, ongoing, and imperative social and ecological concerns, solutions that might be realized through democratic consensus at the level of the states.  

In place of the existing, robust, yet inachievable, vision of a more perfect union represented in our current Constitutionally sanctioned federal system, we need a new federal system prefigured on more modest ambitions of commonality between sovereign states.  Rather than presume that we should largely be capable of collaborating on a broad range domestic policy agendas, we need to concentrate on creating a set of collective, national resources intended to preserve a sufficient continental defense system with a strictly minimalist capacity to engage in collective international collaborations/alliances, to mediate conflict between re-empowered sovereign state governments, to create mechanisms for engagement in mutual aid between the states in response to, in particular, natural disasters and the impacts of long-term ecological transformation, and to manage and maintain our shared physical and virtual interstate infrastructural networks.  Anything more than this invites the sort of partisan sclerosis that currently infects our collective political institutions.  The Article V process offers us an appropriate mechanism to achieve such a subordination of the federal government and reinforcement of state sovereignty.   

The Founders were not of one mind concerning the organization of our constitutional system.  To argue that we are struggling against the logic of their system and the merits of their legacy omits the reality that their system was the outcome of deeply contentious debate in which many patriot voices contributed their dissent toward the idea of a strong union.  The intellectual descendants of those voices have continued to resound over the course of our history, among the founders of the Southern Confederacy and the Antebellum and Postbellum defenders of states' rights.  If, for much of our collective history, the force of consensus, further backed at various moments by the force of federal arms, has overpowered their counterarguments against federal power, then it further stands to reason that a reconsideration of our Constitutional project and the precise alignment of authority between the federal government and the states has always been latent within our political system.  We are not condemned to a single, Hamiltonian Constitutional order; we never have been, and the counterargument in favor of the sovereignty of individual states has always existed as an alternative to be entertained.  Nor are we condemned, as progressives, to find the resolutions of concerns articulated across a national landscape through a central government.  We need to learn not only a more profound modesty in the capacity of democratic deliberation to achieve robust and decisive resolutions of economic, cultural, and ecological policy issues at wider scales, but we must also acknowledge that we cannot impose progressive resolutions collectively on all our conservative countrymen without simultaneously consigning ourselves to the same vulnerability to broader conservative resolutions imposed on us from above.  Above all, we must be resolved that there can never be another Trump, and, if we can only prevent a return to government at the behest of authoritarian rural reactionaries by using the Article V process to permanently dis-empower the federal government vis-à-vis the states, then we must likewise commit to disavowing the reliance of federal authority to impose our will against our unwilling conservative neighbors and countrymen.  

Our present moment illuminates a path toward a sovereign future for our Commonwealth.  In place of the faith the national Democratic Party has placed in consensus at the federal level, we need a new partisan coalition, a New England Party, committed to a return to state sovereignty and taking a step back from a robust federal union.  Such a Constitutional transformation will not be swift; our efforts may take decades or generations to achieve.  On the contrary, we will commit to articulating an alternative organization of governmental resources in this Commonwealth, from each municipality and local public authority to our apparatus of collective governance in every agency and deliberative body of the government of the Commonwealth.  We will work to mobilize the resources of each citizen and of the broader organizations of the private sector to support the fiscal viability and communal sustainability of public policies undertaken by the Commonwealth.  And, in the face of the federal government and of our countrymen in the other states, we will work to dismantle the present apparatus of collective governance and to decisively reduce both the scale of the federal government and the depth of the fiscal burden of governance levied against this Commonwealth and its citizens.  Anyone who willingly joins us will be treated, at least provisionally, as an ally and supporter of our broader project.  To those who disagree with us, in the name of continued or enhanced federal power, we will extend our hands to offer that, notwithstanding our disagreement and our commitment to struggle against your agendas, we respect your perspective.  We will not be separatists or secessionists, nor will we advocate civil conflict or violence between ourselves and our countrymen with whom we have disagreements.  Over two hundred years of our collective history imposes on us an obligation to remember that we are all countrymen in a collective project, but that project must evolve and change as we, collectively, have changed.  Against the supporters of a stronger federal government, we will stand our ground and persevere to reconfigure the federal structure of governance in the United States and permanently enshrine the undiminished sovereignty of the states.  We will stand for the same lofty principles of democratic inclusion, of social justice, of empathy and compassionate concern for the well being of every person in this Commonwealth for which the national Democratic Party has until now represented our champion, but, at home, those principles will become the critical elements of the true democratic consensus of a united Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  We, of this generation, may not live to see the culmination of the new Constitutional order that we envision, but we will commit to a restoration of the sovereignty of this Commonwealth so that, someday, we will seize the full and undiminished force of democracy into our hands and, once again, we will be masters of our own house.      

A Multi-level Approach

Our project for a New England Party should neither represent a single-issue endeavor, nor should it be restricted to a single echelon of governance.  It should contest multiple issues on the federal, state, and local levels, in a similar manner and extent that the national Democratic and Republican parties currently organize their activities.  We will create mechanisms at every level of political discussion to articulate policies on land use and zoning, maintenance of social welfare for disadvantaged populations, public safety, public infrastructure investment, health care, education reform, macroeconomic fiscal and monetary management, and foreign diplomatic engagement.  The point in doing so is that the issue of Constitutional transformation necessitates the creation of an entirely new political universe and that this very transformation demands a transition from the present, sterile bipartisan political reality, speaking in terms of the current political reality, demanding a new reality, and forging the tools to take us forward.  The remainder of this document will be advanced as a entry point for consideration of the many issues that will face us.

           

Necessarily, our beginnings will be small.  We will use social media tools to disseminate the basic principles of our project.  We will create local party organizations that can engage in community building work that will continuously embody our larger commitment to shifting the axis of democracy and citizenship from a national to the state level.  As we move forward, we will develop sets of principles appropriate to finding consensus in local governance on locally focused issues as a means of obtaining power in municipal electoral offices.  We will, then, consolidate local support in order to contest seats in the General Court of the Commonwealth.  It is certain that this endeavor will be a long term struggle.  We will not see an electoral majority in the state legislature for years, maybe decades.  As we advance to a stronger position in the state legislative branch, we will further contest executive offices, included those of governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of the Commonwealth, secretary of Treasury, state auditor, and attorney general.  Similarly, we will progress to contest federal electoral seats, both in individual Congressional districts and for the two statewide Senate seats.  Over the course of our project, we will continue to hone our message, remind the partisan world of the Commonwealth that we exist and that we are determined to seize the governance mechanisms at the state and local levels to propel a revolutionary transformation in developing our own fiscal self-sufficiency and advancing our claim of sovereignty in the federal Constitutional order.     

The Community: Defining the Basic Units of Economic and Cultural Life

Community defines the coming together of individuals into structured relationships.  Some communities, like the family, carry a natural and involuntary character, while others, like firms, arise as artificial constructs of social institutions like the market.  In every sense, however, communities impose sets of rights and responsibilities on individuals and establish divergent sets of hierarchical or non-hierarchical relationships between individuals.  The sorts of communities in which people find themselves involved, by chance or by choice, shape their life circumstances and their world views.  In the United States today, the most influential communities in most people's lives are characterized by market relationships, particularly labor markets, and they are imminently hierarchical in character.  Participation in such communities is driven not merely or primarily by the presence of individual economic liberty but by the compulsion of subsistence and the aspiration for prosperity.  In past generations, however, other forms of community have been more pertinent to the lives of millions of Americans.  In particular, churches of various faiths and denominations have constituted more important forms of community to more Americans in the past.  Likewise, the family, as a basic unit of community life, has been a more stable building block of community engagement for more Americans in previous generations than it is today.  In important ways, the very success of the free market as the bedrock of American economic liberty has simultaneously promoted the breakdown of other important community institutions today, as more and more people find themselves transfixed on the demands of economic well being to the exclusion of alternative manifestations of community solidarity.  This pattern is, itself, important because the hierarchical character of market relations, beyond the conceptual equality of consensual exchange, contorts the capacity of a free people to envision the possibilities of non-market and non-hierarchical relations, including those embodied within the community of citizens in the democratic process.  

            

Far be it from us to undermine the logic of the free market.  We are not the enemies of economic liberty, and American political parties have no business imposing unreasonable constraints on capital investment and the entrepreneurial process.  We will, however, push back at the premise that individual consumption, as an all-encompassing motive of human existence, provides the sole rationale for community.  In Massachusetts, our citizens need more opportunities to enter into communities that emphasize democracy, the equality of individuals, and inclusive engagement in the collective well being of ourselves and our neighbors.  Citizenship, as a manifestation of an egalitarian, inclusive, participatory, and democratic community, needs to be re-envisioned to expand the opportunities for citizens to take part in collective self-governance.  Beyond the state, however, we need more institutions that empower individuals as members of democratic communities that play meaningful roles in everyday life.  We need more environments of collective economic entrepreneurship, like workers' cooperatives.  We need more localized organizations that remind individuals that they are not alone in their lives and that their neighbors are quite often suffering from the same life struggles that they face.  There will be party-supported local organizations of the unemployed, renters at risk of eviction, mortgage holders at risk of foreclosure, migrants at risk of deportation, parents seeking affordable child care, medical patients struggling to obtain access to affordable care or pharmaceuticals, advocates for the sustainability of local food systems and alleviation of malnutrition, and supporters of local police reform and enhanced funding of social services.  There will be large and small convocations of artists and thinkers to consider important questions and to forge new directions in creativity.  And there will be block parties to celebrate our everyday lives in our common neighborhood spaces.  As a party, we cannot allow our struggle for political power to constrain our image of the larger struggle for which we have assembled.  We cannot simply work to create an electorate.  We have an obligation to forge community through multifarious vehicles that will transform the lives of every individual with which we become engaged.  In so doing, we will participate in the broader transformation of the population of the Commonwealth, in the transformation of its economy, and the transformation of its culture such that every citizen of the Commonwealth might find themselves readily engaged participants in the construction of the world that they confront everyday as they depart their home.  Emphatically, we need to leave people feeling empowered in ways they never have before in the interest of making our Commonwealth an aggressively entrepreneurial space committed to the assurance of the common good, prosecuted by the everyday actions of every citizen both through the agency of the state and through the private sector.       

Forcing our way in: The Tactics of Resistance          

The American two-party system offers scant opportunities for outliers to express their unique partisan perspectives in ways that can meaningfully impact the direction of policy, let alone secure fundamental changes to the Constitutional rules of the game.  The success of our efforts would emphatically represent a revolutionary transformation of the Constitution of 1787 to reverse the last hundred years in the delineation of federal and state powers.  We cannot underestimate the fact that we are committing to a distinctly radical politics.  In these terms, we need to be prepared to be marginalized, laughed off, and otherwise ignored as oddball radicals.  In the longer term, our efforts will be vindicated if we remain vigilant and determined to achieve the critical corpus of our goals.  Should we succeed by even a small measure, we will need to be prepared to be despised, vilified, and targeted as unqualified enemies of everything American.  

           

Social media will be critical to the formative stages of our organization.  We will disseminate statements of policy, political arguments, and commentary as official positions of our party organization on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and any other social media platform that can usefully spread our ideas.  None of this is liable to be very influential.  Our capacity to truly transform the political landscape of the Commonwealth will only come as we pursue involvement in non-governmental community organizations and convey common sense proposals for engagement with our local communities.  We will become involved with local Chambers of Commerce, with Leagues of Women Voters, and with private benevolent organizations for local libraries and school systems.  Our supporters who are union members will deepen their involvement in local organizations and seek positions of leadership from shop level stewards to local presidencies.  Our supporters who are actively engaged in consumer cooperatives will seek active involvement in the control boards.  All of these actions will slowly enable us to develop a community persona in the interest of pursuing local governmental power.  We will, similarly, pursue every opportunity to become involved in voluntary municipal boards and commissions as a leaping off point to contesting municipal electoral offices.  In every context, we will adhere to the proposition that the immediate is imperative.  We are not going to walk into municipal zoning board meetings to launch into sermons about the necessity of amending the US Constitution and scrapping every international treaty!  We will listen intently to our neighbors and offer ideas broadly pertinent to the problems immediately at hand, in the hopes that, over time, we will gain the confidence of our communities and get to move forward to consider bigger problems.

            

And we will be entrepreneurial in conceptualizing the span of local social concerns, continuously considering how local community organizing will both enable us to expand our political presence within the community and how our efforts in particular areas can advance our long term agenda, particularly in relation to the organization of voluntary action at the local level.  To the extent that much of what we have to accomplish in reference to our localities will rely on voluntary action rather than formal governmental activity, financed by local taxpayers, every new organizational structure that we develop will constitute a tool in our long term prosecution of the transformation of municipal governance across the Commonwealth.  

            

Change will not be quick, but we will struggle to be heard and to bring people together around the fulfillment of an active and entrepreneurial agenda for local governance, and we will adhere to the broader corpus of our principles that this Commonwealth must once again be sovereign, that our sovereignty demands very substantial, revolutionary changes to the Constitutional structure of the United States, and that our success will reveal a new world of democratic possibilities for Massachusetts.           

  

The 2020 Federal Elections: Imperatives, Compromises, and Threats

The Trump administration has inflicted undiminished harm against our Commonwealth and against the country as a whole.  We would not be articulating the ideas in this document if not for the reality of Trump.  It should go without saying that we would never advocate the reelection of President Trump.  On the other hand, the victory of Vice President Biden against all other alternatives among Presidential candidates in the national Democratic Party primaries was not necessarily an ideal outcome.  Many of us stood behind other, more notably progressive, Democratic candidates, either our senior Senator, Elizabeth Warren, or Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, but we were compelled to endure the complex, compromise outcomes of the broader coalition constituting the national Democratic Party.  If Biden is elected President in November, notwithstanding the obvious likelihood that Trump will contest any outcome in which he does not win reelection, we will get to endure an administration held captive by the myriad push and pull of divergent interests within the big tent of the Democratic Party, even if the Democrats gain a decisive majority in the US Senate and retain control of the US House of Representatives.  A coherent progressive agenda will not rise from the ashes of the disaster that was the Trump administration.  At best we will return to four years of partisan gridlock and the disappointment of hopes to decisively address climate change and the political cancer that has been race relations, much less health care reform and sustainable federal fiscal policy management in relation to macroeconomic needs.  

                 

To be clear, Vice President Biden was not the choice for many of us, but he is the best choice available to us in this dire moment.  He is a lesser of two malignant evils in yet another episode for a generation of the lesser of two evil choices.  We hope that he will be our last, but we are not going to hold our breath.  The point for us is to organize in the interest of ensuring that the lessers of two evils, especially those of the national Democratic Party, will be progressively dis-empowered by virtue of a changing Constitutional foundation beneath their feet.  As such, in November, we must get out and vote for Vice President Biden, either in person on November 3 or in person through early voting or by mail well in advance of November 3.  We cannot afford four more years of Trump and the continued deterioration of American liberty into state authoritarianism and racialist fascism.

                

Beyond the basic imperative to support Vice President Biden in November, we are left with one last desperate concern central to the election of 2020.  Our inability to write the Trump electorate out of existence is matched by our inability to avoid the potential for partisan violence relative to the election's outcome from extremists in the Trump camp for whom no result other than a Trump victory will forestall a long expected new civil war.  In point of fact, we take the threat of partisan civil war, instigated by the radical right, extremely seriously, seriously enough that it has shaped our conclusion that our Commonwealth must pursue sovereignty as the only conceivable future through which we might achieve the realization of our best progressive ideals and, more importantly, where we might avoid the likelihood of violent, militant struggle against our more conservative or reactionary countrymen.  The history of the American revolution in New England posits an appropriate testimony on the nature of violent partisan conflict in regions where one side has a decisive advantage in the coherence of its message, its level of organization, and its capacity to mobilize numbers.  Central New England was largely spared violence during the American revolution because the patriot movement in Massachusetts succeeded very quickly, from 1773, at forcing loyalists out and seizing control of the apparatus of governance outside of Boston.  Critically, we do not know what the morning of November 4 will look like across the country, but we trust that it will be peaceful in our Commonwealth and, furthermore, we are convinced that, as we and our countrymen are pushed farther and farther apart politically, the best, most peaceful, future that we could hope for, a future most conducive to the liberty of free democratic citizens to exercise self-government in their own best interests, would be obtained by Constitutionally dis-empowering the federal government in its current form and returning sovereignty to the states.  

                   

We cannot prescribe a best practice to the supporters of our movement relative to the impending general election, especially in relation to the most apocalyptic imageries of violence that might result from partisan conflict, but we would certainly advise caution.  Not all of us are comfortable with the idea of obtaining and utilizing firearms or other means of self-defense, but we may be living through a moment in our history when the threat of partisan violence would merit doing things we would otherwise have never considered acceptable.  It is an informed moral and practical decision for each one of us to make.  Emphatically, we must be completely vigilant in guarding against the potential for violent action by our more reactionary neighbors right here in the Commonwealth.  Only by doing so will we be able to maintain our own liberty against the rise of authoritarian Trumpism.  Importantly, with regard to the election itself, we must get out and vote in support of Vice President Biden, by whatever means we are able to.  After the election has passed, we must immediately start thinking about our broader project.  From November 4, 2020 forward, we will commit to the project of restoring the sovereignty of our Commonwealth that neither ourselves nor our descendants should be compelled to face such partisan conundrums and threat of partisan conflict and bloodshed ever again.

 

Party Organization

We cannot specify a particular form for the local organizations of our New England Party.  We expect that the particular organization of the party in each municipality will vary in accordance with needs, opportunities, and the unique personalities of party supporters.  To the extent that our local organizations will be intimately involved in local organizing of community groups to coalesce volunteer providers of local services and address unique community needs, the local party organizations will be shaped by the unique circumstances of demographics, economic empowerment/deprivation, and ecological conditions.  As we seek to intervene locally in particular policy areas like education, public health, nutritional support, occupational assistance, and public transportation, we will develop local party committees, perhaps incorporating multiple municipal communities to develop a coordinated party response.  We presume that local involvement in policy committees will cultivate a cadre of potential office seekers for municipal and regional offices.  

At the regional level, we will develop collaborative committees to prioritize particular partisan contests and develop potential candidates for district seats in the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives, for the Governor's Council, and for Congressional district seats.  We cannot specify the number of such committees that will arise, but we would anticipate the development of at least one regional committee for Berkshire and Franklin counties, one for Hampshire county, one for Hampden county, one for Worcester county, one each for Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex counties, one for Bristol and Plymouth counties, and one for Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket counties.  Over time, we will develop a state central committee to prioritize contests and develop candidates for state wide offices, both for the United States Senate seats and for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of the Commonwealth, State Treasurer, State Auditor, and Attorney General.  The state central organization will also develop standing policy committees.  In particular, we will certainly develop standing committees on the promotion of racial equality and gender equity, on economic development, on ecological investment and maintenance, and on Constitutional reorganization and judicial reform.  Over time, our organizations at each level will evolve around the changing needs of the Commonwealth and around our own changing priorities.      

We will insist that all of holders of party positions in local organizations and regional committees be volunteers.  Adamantly, we do not know precisely how we will be able to develop the resources necessary to establish full-time paid organizational positions within the state central organization of the party, but it is our intention to have a professional organization at this level of the party, in compliance with applicable legal standards on campaign finance and non-profit political advocacy.  It is, further, our intention to support the selection of candidates for particular electoral offices through a two-step process.  We will not participate in primary electoral contests.  On the contrary, we will establish basic and sufficiently rigorous sets of qualifying conditions for candidates for each contestable electoral office for which we will accept candidates.  Once a list of candidates for each office has been selected, we will operate a ballot lottery among the candidates, selecting our candidates strictly by lot.  This, admittedly, removes the democratic process from the internal candidate section process for the party, but it has the advantage of reducing the predictable development of factions within the party, removes the potential for individual differences in campaign finances to determine candidacies, and, at least potentially, undermines the potential for charismatic and otherwise gregarious individuals to dominate party organizations and steer policy priorities at the expense of less popular but more experienced and/or educated candidates.  In a broader sense, we believe that, provided we do not make basic qualifying conditions excessively rigorous, lotteries will sustain a greater diversity of candidates and expand the range of individuals who are willing to actively engage in the workings of the party with a palpable hope that their involvement will address the particular range of needs and concerns that they bring to the table.  

As a final consideration with specific regard to the ideologies of local party organizations, we recognize that local organizations are apt to be driven by the personalities of the continuously most active members, and, in a party that will be committed to local activist organization, such members will levy a strong influence over the ideological positions advocated by local party organizations.  In part, this document is advanced as a starting point in crystalizing an initial partisan ideological framework for this party, but we will progress through the activism of our members and, as such, we will invariably encounter intra-party ideological fights, both with regard to policy and tactics.  To be clear, if we are to succeed in creating a mass party organization that will one day be capable of contesting political power in the Commonwealth and at the federal level, then we cannot afford to submit ourselves to the ideological circular firing squads of the American left.  We understand that many members will be passionately committed to organizing around racial justice, gender equity, redistributive economics, and a range of other concerns, but our zeal for particular partisan causes cannot be allowed to create durable intra-party cleavages or lead to the departure of members over petty differences in the use of language.  Rather, we need local leaders to be fully committed to the unity of their organizations and to the full disclosure of intra-party disputes so that they can be resolved in the open in ways that acknowledge the validity of all individual positions and that simultaneously recognize that every member is human and prone to very human imperfections.  We are committed to party unity through internal discursive democracy and progressive inclusiveness.

  

The Local: Doing More with Fewer Resources

The success of our endeavors will not be swift, but in local and municipal levels of governance, we might immediately discover positive results from the execution of our broader strategies.  At the local level, we will continuously learn how we can achieve greater results from our efforts with very minimal fiscal resources at our disposal.  Critically, we must be steadfast fiscal conservatives in our municipal governments.  In this regard, I do not mean that we should oppose any efforts to override Proposition Two and a Half restrictions on municipal property tax levies.  Rather, we need to be rigorous defenders of using the assets available in our municipalities in the most efficient manner possible and support new infrastructure and equipment investments only when they are absolutely imperative.  Likewise, we must do everything we can to keep labor costs to municipalities in check.  If we can do so by consolidating certain municipal functions, especially human resources, across multiple municipalities, then this might be a desirable approach to achieve greater fiscal flexibility in component municipalities.  Whatever administrative changes we can make to economize on expenditures at the municipal level through integration of processes across municipalities to develop broader regional functions, we should pursue.     

          

Critically, we have to be attentive toward the sources of fiscal funding that we are utilizing.  In this regard, we must reject recourse to any federal funding at the municipal level.  Notably, we need to support measures to wean public educational districts in the Commonwealth off all assistance under the Elementary and Secondary Educational Act (ESEA) regime of the US Department of Education.  Likewise, we need to refuse school lunch subsidies provided by the US Department of Agriculture.  We should refuse financial assistance for transportation infrastructure development and maintenance under the various programs of the Federal Highway Administration and other administrations organized to dispense transportation funding.  We should refuse financial assistance from the US Department of Health and Human Services for enforcement of provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  In these cases and others, the financial assistance to local and state governments in question represents the disbursement of funds that would never be assembled if the federal government was deprived of adequate fiscal mechanisms to tax our citizens or otherwise accumulate debt accountable as well to our citizens in order to develop programmatic allocations.  It might be practical, in the short run, to argue that we should accept whatever funding the federal government is willing to disperse in our direction, but, in the long run, if we are determined to shrink the fiscal capacity of the federal government and eliminate its ability to engage in public policy formulation and financing and, hence, to deny the federal government any meaningful role in the governance of our local communities, then we have to start somewhere to say, "no, we don't need your help."  

           

If such a partisan standpoint against federal funding is ever to succeed in our municipalities, then we need to develop the sorts of local institutions that can make up for the total absence of federal funding.  Emphatically, we need community organizations that will fill the gaps, especially in areas like public education.  We need educated individuals providing free, voluntary contributions of time to provide assistance to public school educators and administrators in ways that will support the educational performance of children, integrate public schools into a broader structure of local economic sustainability, and, more generally, nourish the solidarity of local communities relative to the development of new generations of free citizens.  We need to secure strictly local food assistance for disadvantaged individuals, especially in the public schools, by building local networks in the production and assembly of food - essentially enhanced performance of food banks to satisfy the proliferation of needs.  None of these measures will be easy or straightforward.  Community organizing is a slough against which our best efforts at persuasion to express the imperative nature of collective action and sacrifice often come to naught.  On the contrary, it is the only way we can move forward if our Commonwealth is ever to breath the air of freedom and self-rule over the yoke of tyranny to which we are being subjected as the price for accepting a few dollars of financial support from Washington.    

The State: Developing New Fiscal Capacities and Filling the Gaps Created by Retracted Federalism

The state government of the Commonwealth will, henceforth, be the preeminent engine to exercise the democratic sovereignty of our citizens, and, in this sense, the strategies that we develop to reshape the functioning of the state government of Massachusetts will constitute the critical axis of our entire project.  In the long run, we envision the government of the Commonwealth undertaking a range of duties and missions currently assigned to the federal government and addressing a number of concerns for which the federal government has failed to advance the slightest response in the interest of our citizens.  Emphatically, as we make our way into the General Court of the Commonwealth, the Governor's Council, and the executive offices of the Commonwealth, displacing most importantly partisans of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, we will recognize the serious limitations on what we can accomplish under the present circumstances of American federalism and the fundamental constraints imposed by fiscal discipline in circumstances where we are neither fiscally nor monetarily sovereign.  In the future, if we succeed in our broader project, these circumstance will change, but for now, we need to moderate our expectations on what we can accomplish for our citizens.  Critically, in the first stages of our engagement in state government, we must survey our opportunities to expand exploitable sources of fiscal financing, both to eliminate existing deficits and to develop the reserves that will fund our initial replace to displace the role of the federal government in numerous policy areas.  Our strategy must be shaped by a continuous process of fiscal triage to determine how and when we can begin to replace the functions of the federal government based on the simultaneous retraction of federal fiscal capacities orchestrated through the reduction of federal tax rates and elimination of federally financed agencies and programs.  In effect, our actions in Boston will simultaneously be shaped by what we can achieve in Washington.  

               

The remainder of this document attempts to advance a number of initiatives to which we would hope to adequately address through the agency of the government of Commonwealth as our broader efforts against the federal government begin to bear fruit, but, in a more general sense, we cannot say when or how we will be able to fully address all of the concerns that have compelled us to articulate our ideas.  The most that we can say relative to the functioning of the government of the Commonwealth in an environment in which we are actively engaged in the retraction of federal power is that we must commit ourselves a certain set of principles.  First, we must continuously respect the fiscal limitations imposed on us by the our tax structures, including recourse to the state income tax, sales, and excise taxes.  As we advance, we will have to amend existing tax structures in the Commonwealth.  In particular, it will be imperative to transform the income tax into a progressive tax structure, with multiple tax margins.  This will necessitate changes to the constitution of the Commonwealth and will, thus, necessitate recourse to the broader process of constitutional amendment.  In the absence of a progressive income tax, the larger course of our partisan project in Massachusetts will be for naught.  On the other hand, we must respect the evolving contours of private capital investment and of broader economic activity in the Commonwealth in relation to changes in the tax codes of the Commonwealth to ensure that we do not stifle economic growth, especially in areas close to our boundaries.  It goes without saying that any change in our taxing structures will have substantial effects on the private sector, and there will be certain negative effects that we cannot mitigate.  On the contrary, we cannot saddle our citizens with unreasonable fiscal burdens that will not be at least partially offset by our efforts to reduce the burdens imposed by the federal government.  The future institutions of taxation in the Commonwealth must continuously be both fair and reasonable in relation to the fiscal responsibilities that we have undertaken and the necessity of maintaining a robust private, entrepreneurial market economy.

              

Furthermore, our consideration of state taxation and, in particular, progressive taxation, must simultaneously take account of our longer term objectives for redistribution.  Many of us come from partisan quarters favorable to more extensive fiscal redistributions of wealth and income in remediation of wealth and income inequalities.  These concerns are valid and they have a place in our party, but we cannot move too quickly in this direction before we make decisive changes to federal taxation and federal tax expenditure programs.  Further, we will never be able to exercise redistributive fiscal policy in a vacuum.  If certain segments of the population of the Commonwealth feel disproportionately ravaged by changes to our tax code in the interest of greater economic equality, then they will leave and we will be deprived both of their entrepreneurial activity and their incomes as components within our Common-wealth.  The creation of a durable, stable redistributive tax structure in Massachusetts will be a long term project, intimately connected to the process through which we regain our sovereignty vis-à-vis the federal government.  Anyone who aspires to come to our partisan table to eat the rich in our Commonwealth tomorrow will be sorrowfully disappointed by our commitment to moderation, fiscal restraint, and attention to the immediate needs of our citizens against any fanciful imageries of economic utopia.

              

On the contrary, we will begin to ask how our actions through the agency of the government of the Commonwealth can bear fruit in the construction of greater economic democracy immediately, but our actions will preeminently respect the workings of the free market, strengthened labor market institutions of collective bargaining, and the capacities of consumers, workers, and investors to engage in private co-operative projects that can more broadly disseminate economic power without otherwise threatening a vigorous entrepreneurial environment.  In particular, as the fiscal capacity of the government of the Commonwealth expands, we will actively invest in diverse private entrepreneurial projects that promise more extensive empowerment of economically disadvantaged groups, especially through the development of co-operative organizations that will more widely share the production and distribution of generated wealth.  We will, over time, transform the broader structure of our private economy to promote a more extensive distribution of wealth and well being for all our citizens, but it will not happen overnight, it will not be orchestrated exclusively through the largess of redistributive tax policies, and it will not displace a fundamentally free and entrepreneurial market economy.    

              

Finally, once we have begun to retract the regulatory burden that the federal government has imposed on the Commonwealth and, in particular, on our private sector, we need to be cautious about stepping into the void and over-regulating.  If, in this respect, we release private businesses in Massachusetts from regulation of health and safety conditions through federal OSHA and FDA regulators, then we need to sincerely and thoughtfully consider how we mean to replace federal regulation of local enterprise with state regulation such that we do not impose unnecessary burdens on our entrepreneuriat.  We need to continuously ask ourselves when and how we need to step in against the private sector in the best interests of workers, consumers, investors, and otherwise disconnected third-parties to economic activities.  If we fail in this measure, by either jeopardizing public safety, diminishing the quality of life of our citizens, or crushing the capacity of local enterprise to successfully operate under competitive conditions, then our broader project will come to naught.  However we undertake our responsibilities as caretakers of the common good and defenders of the free market in Massachusetts, we will ultimately be judged by our citizens, for whom our failure will undermine our broader argument in favor of state sovereignty.   

The Federal: Absolute Libertarianism, Austerity, and the Demand for Retraction/Devolution

As much as we will vigorously support the expansion of powers to the states and steer Massachusetts to a position where it can actively promote the well being of all our citizens, we will work to undermine the fiscal capacity of the federal government in order to create a fiscal space for the states to resume the initiative in domestic policy formulation and execution.  It will take time for us to move forward, but we will actively contest every Congressional district seat in the Commonwealth and both Senate seats in order to advance our partisan standpoint in Washington.  There we will seek to ally provisionally with all parties who advocate our positions relative to the status of the federal government and the relationship of the federal government to the states.  Emphatically, we will seek to drastically diminish the fiscal capacity of the federal government and force it to make unimaginable cuts in the scale of federal bureaucracies, manpower, and ability to engage in domestic policy and to contemplate the use of military manpower beyond our continental boundaries and our Pacific possessions.  We will act as stark economic libertarians in Washington, advocating cuts to all manifestations of federal taxation and the elimination of federal agencies and entire cabinet departments.  Conversely, we will faithfully act to fund a significantly constricted continental defense structure, inclusive of an evolving structure of offensive strategic nuclear assets, and we will ensure that the lingering portfolio of sovereign public debt liabilities, held in the hands of the US Treasury, will be faithfully redeemed in accordance with our responsibilities as public borrowing agents.   

               

This document is not the place for an exhaustive and sequential plan for how we plan to exercise the retraction of the federal government, but, as we have argued above, any plan for retraction of the federal government needs to proceed with a clear degree of simultaneity with our organization at the state governmental level in order to ensure that the Commonwealth can step in to fill the federal government's shoes once we have eliminated a bureaucracy or a domestic policy role.  If we repeal the functional terms of the Pure Food and Drug Act, for example, eliminating the federal Food and Drug Administration, then we need a plan in place at the level of the Commonwealth to enable a state level organization to undertake parallel functions to ensure continuity of food safety and efficacy of pharmaceutical products utilized by citizens of the Commonwealth.  If we eliminate the National Parks Service and transfer care taking of National Parks and National Historical sites to the states, then the Commonwealth will be compelled to develop programs for the care of presently federal sites within our boundaries.  The critical point to be advanced here is that we will need to proceed thoughtfully, both with respect to the sorts of changes that may be possible relative to partisan support/alliances in Congress and the sorts of changes that can be readily achieved without inflicting palpable harm against the long term interests of our broader project of state sovereignty or the well being the country as a whole.  We have to remember that we are not acting to destroy the United States by a million small cuts in the capacity of the federal government to exercise meaningful public policy or to inflict intentional harm on our citizens or those of the other states, but we are completely determined to transform the United States by consigning the federal government to a subordinate role relative to the states.  If Massachusetts is incapable at a particular moment of replacing a particular function of the federal government, then we will have to wait to eliminate such functions until our Commonwealth is ready to step in and fill the role.  Over time, as we move forward with our project, we may discover representatives of other states who are wholly enthusiastic with the broader terms of our project and ready to propel their own state governments to replace the public policy functions of the federal government, and, as such, the retraction of the federal government may pick up steam.    

                

Among the areas of federal funding that may remain most intractable over time, reductions in the Department of Defense budget will certainly constitute a long term problem to which we will concentrate much attention.  As with every area of federal funding, we do not want to cut the floor out of federal financing to uniformed services and to the broad range of defense contractors without some larger vision of how we mean to replace the services that we eliminate.  On the other hand, the military represents a conspicuous target for elimination of federal spending.  In this regard, we have to bear in mind that the imperative of collective continental defense secured through the Department of Defense is one that Massachusetts cannot replace and one that no state can forego.  We will certainly not abolish the Department of Defense.  Nor can we even plausibly question the continued existence of the most conspicuous and lethal component of the Department of Defense's myriad portfolios of weapon systems, the nuclear triad.  As our party achieves a place at the table in questions of federal funding and the continued maintenance of shared assets, even as we contemplate a vast retraction of the federal government, we will certainly need to consider how we can continue to achieve a viable and convincing capacity to exercise continental defense in a world that contains multiple states capable of utilizing nuclear arsenals and a diverse range of other non-nuclear offensive threats to this country and all its states.  However, we cannot continue to serve as the default intervening arm of military force for the NATO alliance and for broader international coalitions against recalcitrant governments, and the present scale and organizational structure of the US military invites its ready deployment to the far corners of the planet whether or not particular military interventions transparently constitute serious and clear matters of national security for the country as a whole or for each of our states.  Emphatically, we will diminish the scale of the US military and reorganize it so that it is decisively oriented toward continental defense to the exclusion of broader, trans-oceanic alliance structures and the pursuit of policies supporting globally extensive corporate interests.  

Changes to the federal income and payroll tax structures will be critical to our entire project.  If our Commonwealth is ever to achieve an adequate threshold of fiscal space to supplant the roles of the federal government as the principal vehicle for fiscal policy management for our citizens, then we must force the federal government to accept significantly reduced income levies from our citizens enabling us to tax ourselves more intensively for our own democratically defined needs.  At present, the Commonwealth taxes incomes earned in Massachusetts at a flat five percent rate while the federal government exacts incomes at a set of marginal rates adjusted to account for a range of policy-driven deductions.  If these two situations could effectively be reversed, forcing the federal government to receive relatively flat rates not exceeding five percent for the overwhelming majority of the US population with fully reformed/cleansed categorical income deductions, this would enable Massachusetts to not only introduce a graduated/progressive tax structure but also to raise rates across multiple margins to address an expansion of the policy roles and priorities of the government of the Commonwealth.  It would simultaneously force a significant retraction of federal expenditures.  Whole cabinet departments and scores of agency administrations would have to be eliminated by sheer fiscal necessity, opening up the policy space through which the Commonwealth might take the opportunity to act in the interests of our citizens.  

            

Additionally, we will not only advocate a broader reconsideration of payroll tax rates in support of Social Security and Medicare to stabilize the finances of their various trust funds, but we will move to have the assets and liabilities accountable to the citizens of each state statutorily transferred directly to their respective state governments for disposal in accordance with the democratically enunciated wishes of these respective electorates.  We are incapable of envisioning a general formula through which the various programmatic distributions of the Social Security system might be placed on a surer fiscal footing as the age profile of the wider US population increases that would ever achieve universal consent from the citizens of every state or, minimally, their elected representatives.  It would be better, for this very reason, to undertake a reform of the fiscal dynamics of the entitlement programs, more generally, from the standpoint of each state through the various state legislatures in accordance with the democratic will of the respective state electorates rather than through the muddle and blur and incoherence and indecision of Congress.  Some state electorates will, doubtless, prefer wholesale privatization of retirement insurance and medical insurance for retirees as the logical resolution to inadequacies in funding for the respective trust funds for these systems as state populations age.  In Massachusetts, we will promote a public resolution through adjustment in payroll tax rates and the negotiation of compensation rates for medical providers in the Medicare system.  In turn, as we transfer the onus for entitlement reform to the state legislatures, we will embed the loyalty or, conversely, the ire of recipients into the hands of the state governments.  In our Commonwealth, our General Court will either be honored as the savior and guardian of the Social Security and Medicare systems for our citizens against the pervasive irresponsibility of its federal administrative managers or we will be vilified as the devils responsible for its destruction and the impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of retirees who would have relied on these systems for support in the twilight years.  It will make a great many people dependent on the managerial expertise of our state governments and, thus, loyal toward our sovereign state governments if we epitomize efficiency and reliability in delivering returns to our citizens.  

                

We will also move to reconsider a federal role in law enforcement and criminal justice.  In strictly Constitutional terms, we question the capacity of the federal government to engage anywhere in the enforcement of criminal justice with the conceivable exception of prosecutions under the charge of treason against the national security of the United States and the exercise of piracy within the jurisdictional waters patrolled by the United States Navy.  To the best of our abilities, we will support the elimination of the federal criminal code and, especially, provisions committed to the prohibition of controlled/narcotic substances.  Further, we will truncate the mission of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to constitute a service in support of law enforcement on the state level, enforcing state criminal codes, and we will support the elimination of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms as agencies enforcing elements of criminal law wholly inconsistent with the limited Constitutional powers and duties assigned to the federal government.  We will replace the Transportation Security Administration with state level protection of transportation terminals and infrastructures.  We will move to eliminate the federal Bureau of Prisons and to transfer all incarcerated individuals held within its facilities into the hands of the states within which their crimes were committed for determination of their status with the understanding that such a transfer of jurisdiction should not be construed to subject individuals to legal double jeopardy.  We will strictly limit the role of the United States Marshals' Service to act at the behest of the federal judiciary and provide security for its members.     

Against our greater commitment to eliminate much of the existing administrative functions of the federal government, we will fiercely commit to the maintenance of funding for the Federal Emergency Management Administration and for the development of funding resources reserved both for emergency response and proactive planning and infrastructure development for land spaces at risk for devastation from climate change related weather events.  The prevalence of catastrophic climatological events in the future is likely to continue to increase unabated for particular geographies throughout the United States, and the effects of such events may overwhelm the fiscal resources available to individuals states.  If we are to remain a unified country, then we must commit to continue to address the sufferings of our countrymen, regardless of our partisan differences, when they are in need of our collective assistance.  There are few better collective investments in the solidarity of all Americans that we can identify then disaster relief and preemptive hardening of infrastructures to increase the survivability of local populations in the face of catastrophic events.   

We will finally, and emphatically, guard the fiscal solvency of the United States government as debtor and default source of the safest investment instrument against the risk of default on the face of the planet.  If necessary, we will support expansion of the debt limit imposed on the Federal Treasury, but we will simultaneously support a constrained federal budget that will ensure that the federal government will not run fiscal deficits and, if possible, will experience fiscal surpluses that will, over time, reduce the scale of our collective debt.  Such a situation will ultimately require a significant retraction of the size and administrative scope of the federal government, and we will exuberantly support such a retraction.  If we are successful, then the federal government of the United States will finance a convincing continental defense of each of its states, will support a robust collective interstate transportation and communications infrastructure, will respond quickly and decisively to diverse and serious ecological disasters inflicting severe costs on our countrymen across the various states, and will compensate every global investor from whom we have received the trust that we would be an honorable and trustworthy borrower of the world's savings.                  

The Constitutional: Transformation to a New Federal Relationship

In essence, the long term mission of our party will be to fundamentally transform the Constitutional order of the United States from one privileging the centralizing mechanisms developed in the Constitution of 1787 and bring us somewhat closer to the Constitutional structures that obtained prior to ratification, effectively reimagining a different point of departure from the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution of 1787 had replaced.  On the other hand, this new point of departure has to emerge as a product of the Article V process to amend the Constitution of 1787.  As such, we will engage in a longer process of identifying and removing certain elements of the present Constitutional structure that promote the centralization of governance in a range of areas in the hands of the federal government, returning those elements to the states.  Critically, this reorganization must address the place of the Supremacy clause, minimally to constrict the areas in which the supremacy of federal legal and Constitutional principles can be invoked in relation to statutory and constitutional issues at the level of each state.  It must also address the Fourteenth Amendment and the longer history of the selective incorporation of Constitutional protections and prohibitions, strictly applicable against actions by the federal government, against actions undertaken by state governments.  It will have to reconsider the range of Article I powers enumerated or otherwise appropriated as necessary and proper to the execution of enumerated powers by Congress.  Especially, it will have to reconsider the nature of Congressional actions in relation to the regulation of interstate commerce.  It will have to seriously reconsider the prohibitions on the exercise of powers by the states delineated in Article I, Section 10.  It will have to strictly qualify the authorities conferred on Articles III courts relative to the states.  Finally, and critically as a result of the Trump administration, it will have to seriously reconsider the terms of Article II and the powers of the office of President, especially as those powers relate to the states.  More generally, there will be few relevant areas in the broader construction of federal power as it has evolved since the ratification of the Constitution toward which we will not advocate a radical transformation in order to strip Congress, the federal judiciary, and the office of the President of significant degrees of authority relative to the states.     

                   

If we insist that the present set of relations between the federal government and the states has veered too far in the direction of the centralization of power in the hands of Washington, then we are effectively approaching the particular moment in which the Founders planted the seeds of centralization at the Constitutional convention.  It is, first and foremost, reflected in the Supremacy Clause (Article VI, second clause).  In the most abstract sense, we are not a nation, constituted by our unification under a foundational document, without this clause, and if we were to repeal it or qualify its application then we would fundamentally transform the nature of the United States as a nation created and governed by a constitution.  In these terms, the Supremacy Clause and our inability to remove it from the Constitution without destroying the nation is our starting point.  Acknowledging this point, we are not out to remove the Supremacy Clause but to transform the nature, responsibilities, and powers of the government to which it references.  Article VI is our stable pivot point in approaching the remainder of the Constitution.

                 

We may not accept all of the present conditions under which members of the two houses of Congress are elected, serve in their representative capacities, and are compensated for their efforts, but most of these details are subjects amenable to statutory remedies.  Our primary concerns relative to Congress reside in the enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8 and, most especially, in the Commerce clause.  Like the Founders, we are committed to the principle that the federal government must exist as a special purpose government, in distinction from the general purpose governments residing in the states, strictly limited to the exercise of an enumerated set of powers intended to address a strictly limited range of responsibilities of which the state governments renounce their capacity to act by virtue of their mutual incapacity to adequately address a broader collective interest across the states.  In our time, we have concluded that the list of enumerated powers granted by the Founders to Congress is simply too long and too open to expansion in ways that trample the freedom of action of state governments to individually serve the best interests of their citizens.  For this reason, we will resolve to remove, by amendment, certain of Congress' enumerated powers.  

              

Most critically, we will not accept the Commerce clause as it is currently written, insofar as the interpretation of this clause, both, directly, by Congress and, retrospectively, by the federal judiciary, has opened the door for Congress to engage in myriad policy areas for which the Founders envisioned no Congressional role.  If the Commerce clause can Constitutionally underwrite a Congressional role in the operation of local school districts despite the absence of any reference to education anywhere in the Constitution, then we need to rewrite the Commerce clause to permanently close this window on the federal government.  Moreover, if our state governments are ever to achieve a threshold of sovereignty over macroeconomic policy and the performance of economic agents within our intrastate jurisdictions, then it is clear that we need a clarification of our own powers to engage in the regulation of commerce in relation to the federal Constitution far more than a blanket extension of powers to Congress.  If we succeed in reframing the powers of Congress to regulate commerce, then the federal government should be largely deprived of any capacity to regulate economic matters within our state boundaries short of direct taxation strictly for the limited purposes of maintaining its own fiscal solvency.

                

The chief argument for enabling Congress to regulate interstate commerce resides in the vast expansiveness of economic networks and the complex interconnections between purely local economic processes and the national macroeconomy.  In these terms, the federal government stands more readily able to exercise effective regulatory control in the collective interests of all the states as the default overseer for commerce in general.  We cannot devise adequate language to express our agreement in the overwhelmingly complex nature of contemporary economic activity, with industrial supply chains extending tens of thousands of miles across the planet, from Massachusetts to Mumbai and a thousand and one other places.  Farmers in Nebraska not only sweeten soft drinks with high fructose corn syrup in Georgia and Oregon but power internal combustion engines with ethanol in Michigan and Kentucky and fill the bellies of children with wheat bread in South Africa.  Restaurateurs at resort communities in Colorado ponder the consequences of continued travel COVID-19 travel restrictions and the possibilities that a new wave of illness will continue to pressure their bottom lines as visitors from other states and foreign countries stay away.  This very complexity of our economies neither obviates our very real interest in guarding the particular economic imperatives of our citizens, in both interstate and international commerce, nor does it provide adequate reasoning to support investing the economic welfare of every state in the partisan inflected hands of Congress or delegating those regulatory powers into the biased hands of a partisan chief executive.  Should information technology firms in California be held hostage in the operation of their supply chains through East Asia because a Presidential administration wants to fight a trade war with China over the exportation of soybeans from Iowa?!  

             

We reject the premise that, somehow, the federal government should be better situated to balance the competing interests of economic agents in one state against those of other agents across the country through active engagement negotiating trade agreements with foreign governments.  On the contrary, we recognize that the federal government has a legitimate Constitutional interest and responsibility to safeguard national security for all the states and, thus, to prevent individual state governments from negotiating trade agreements with foreign governments that may compromise our national security.  Congress needs the capacity to exercise a veto over the actions of individual state governments in relation to international commerce.  We need to expressly rewrite the Constitutional terms concerning international commerce by the federal government in this form, denying the capacity of the federal government to act independently in negotiating the terms of international commerce but enabling the federal government to prohibit international trade agreements negotiated by individual states that manifestly damage our collective national security. And we will, likewise, amend the terms of Article I, Section 10 to expressly state the conditions and restrictions under which we will be empowered to negotiate the commercial agreements that shape the engagement of our states' macroeconomies with every foreign economy.     

                

We similarly reject the role of Congress in the regulation of the money supply.  Article I, Section 8 grants Congress the authority to coin money, but this enumerated power is largely irrelevant to the larger operation of the national macroeconomy compared to the delegated authority, exercised through the Commerce clause, establishing the Federal Reserve system and establishing the dollar as the sole legal tender and standard of value in the macroeconomy of the United States.  We concede the argument that Congress must be empowered to borrow money on the credit of the United States and that, in order to do so, Congress must be capable of issuing sovereign currency.  However, we reject in principle that the states must be compelled to accept a uniform currency, stripping each of the states, of their own accord, of monetary sovereignty.  If we, in the states, are to be fiscally sovereign in exercising macroeconomic policy in the interest of our citizens, then we must be capable of borrowing in our own sovereign currencies, accepting the consequences inherent in bad fiscal policy management on the appreciation and depreciation of currency values.  Massachusetts will have its own dollar, as will every other state and the federal government, and every one will float against each other and the Euro, the Pound Sterling, the Chinese Yuan, and every other globally traded currency in international exchange, contingent on the strength of our internal economies and the fiscal discipline of our respective governments. Categorically, we will not allow Congress to prohibit us from issuing our own sovereign currency as legal tender for the debts and obligations of our citizens or from issuing our own sovereign debt in the interest of maintaining our fiscal sovereignty and meeting the needs of our citizens.  In this manner, we will alter the terms of Article I, Section 10 to reflect our sovereign capacity to manage our sovereign monetary systems, and we will accept whatever inconveniences attend to the process of converting our own currency into federal dollars to accomplish payment in full of our levies for the federal budget of the United States on the behalf of all our countrymen.

                     

In the interest of maintaining a free and unencumbered market for goods and services across the states, we will insist on inclusion of language to ensure that both the federal government and the state governments shall be prohibited from laying tariffs on goods and services exchanged between the states except, as offered in Article I, Section 10, "what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's (sic) inspection Laws."  On the contrary, we will also seek to strictly limit the capacity of the federal government to impose tariffs on goods and services from foreign economies beyond Constitutionally fixed limits in support of maintaining fiscal balances.  If we, in the states, are to exercise sovereignty over our internal economies and our engagements with rest of the global economy, then we must maintain the capacity to manage the imposition of tariffs on foreign goods and services in the interests of our own citizens and of our own producers.  We will insist on language that extends to the state governments the power to impose tariffs on foreign goods and services, at will and without the consent of Congress, in accordance with standards of our construction, in particular on rules of origin for goods entering final consumption markets, consistent, in turn, with multilateral agreements on international trade.  We do not aspire to build a wall of protective tariffs around the economy of our Commonwealth against the rest of the world, but neither will we surrender our prerogative to protect our economy from streams of international commerce detrimental to the long term interests of our citizens.  

                  

We recognize that Congress, on the behalf of all the states, must have a role in the determination of rules for naturalization of United States citizens, especially under the motivation of safeguarding the national security of all the states.  On the contrary, as with the negotiation of foreign trade agreements, we will insist that each state government be vested with the power to determine rules for naturalization of citizens in our own interests and that Congress be vested solely with the capacity to exercise a retrospective veto over our actions when Congress deems that our actions might be detrimental to national security.  We will strip Congress of any direct role in the determination of rules for naturalization and, similarly, we will strip Congress of any role in the determination of uniform rules for bankruptcy.  If our states are to be sovereign, then we will maintain the exclusive prerogative to determine who we will include as our citizens, including the circumstances under which we will invite foreign citizens to join the community of our citizens, and under what conditions we will extend to our citizens the capacity to claim protection from financial creditors.  We recognize that, in the interest of maintaining communications linkages across all the states, Congress should have the power to establish a post office and post roads, but we would similarly insist that these functions should be shared between Congress and the state governments.  We recognize the necessity of having a legal structure for the protection of patents on scientific and technical information and trademarks for intellectual property, but we insist that such powers be vested exclusively in the hands of the states and stripped from the Article I, Section 8 powers enumerated to Congress.  We, lastly, reject the exclusive authority enumerated to Congress over the District of Columbia.  This jurisdiction and its citizens should be granted statehood, supplied with the sovereign authority to establish its own legislative capacity and executive authority by means of the universal suffrage of its adult citizens, empowered to undertake every power granted to every other state, and supplied with two United States Senate seats and a requisite number of seats, empowered to actually vote, in the United States House of Representatives relative to its population.  We would, likewise, support the extension of statehood to all of the U.S. territories, most especially Puerto Rico but also Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa.  

                     

We grant that Congress must be vested with exclusive authority to determine the appropriate conditions through which the national security of all the states might be safeguarded against foreign threats and against internal rebellion, and we, likewise, grant that Congress should maintain the authority to call upon the states to provide state military forces of the National Guard systems in the interest of national defense, inclusive of all lands governed under the broader authority of the United States.  On the contrary, we recognize that there must be limitations on the capacity of Congress to organize federalized military forces.  If we, in the states, renounce any capacity to organize or determine the rule for operation of naval forces, including both the Navy and Coast Guard, then we similarly insist that the scale of federalized naval forces be limited and strictly proportional to the needs of exercising a convincing continental defense, inclusive of all lands under the authority of the United States like the state of Hawaii and the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico.  If these concerns are not strictly matters for Constitutional enactment, then they are certainly issues that will continuously be subject for contestation henceforth in Congress.  More importantly, we will insist on significant restrictions and limitations on the capacity of Congress to federalize state military forces and to intervene militarily in territories under the jurisdiction of individual sovereign states against internal rebellions without either the submission of a request or affirmation of consent from the affected state governments.  If we are to be sovereign in our own territorial jurisdictions, then we, in the states, will be the judge of when the support of federal military forces is required to quell internal disturbances undermining our capacity to maintain the peace or ensure civil order for our citizens.  

                      

We grant that Congress must have the capacity to raise tax revenues in support of its duties to safeguard our collective defense, for the maintenance of collective physical and virtual public infrastructures, and to respond to ecological disasters beyond the capacities of individual states to effectively recover, consistent both with the enumerated powers extended in Article I, Section 8 and with the Sixteenth Article of Amendment.  On the contrary, it is clear that the sovereignty of our states will be undermined if Congress does not face strict limitations on its capacity to tax our citizens.  In these terms, we may not Constitutionally constrain the power of Congress to impose taxes in general, but we will struggle to ensure that federal taxation will be strictly limited, if only by statutory enactment.  

                      

In regard to the institutions established by Article II, we grant that the President should assume authority as Commander-in-Chief of the federalized armed forces of the United States, but we will not consent to the extension of unabridged direct authority over the immediate utilization of the federalized military forces to the office of the President.  In particular, we will not consent to the continued extension of the exclusive capacity to utilize the strategic nuclear forces of the United States into the hands of the President.  This power must be dismantled and reconfigured into the hands of a joint committee of uniformed military and civilian officials, continuously in operation and under the direct oversight of Congress, to ensure that the capacity to utilize weapons capable of annihilating all life on the planet will never again be vested into the hands of a single individual of questionable intelligence or integrity.  Given the utmost gravity of this subject, we would insist that such a bifurcation of executive authority and the organization of military forces be written into the language of the Constitution to ensure that no future Presidential administration can gain access to the strategic nuclear arsenal.  Moreover, we will insist in the codification of conditions into the language of the Constitution through which the President, in the role of Commander-in-Chief, may seek permission from the Governors of individual states to intervene in domestic rebellions and other civil disturbances not originating from foreign sources and that, absent expressed permission, federalized military or security forces shall be prohibited from such interventions.  There will be no new incidents of federal agents apprehending protesters in the vicinity of federal installations, like at the Wyatt Federal Building in Portland, Oregon in 2020, under federally usurped authority to embark on local police functions without the permission of either local authorities or of state governors.  We will ensure that such authoritarian legacies of the Trump administration will be permanently and categorically forbidden for future Presidential administrations.     

Furthermore, we will consent to the establishment of embassies and appointment of ambassadors by the President, under the advice and consent of the United States Senate, in the interest of safeguarding the national security of all the states by means of establishing diplomatic relations and structuring military alliances necessary for our collective defense.  We will not consent to allowing the Office of the President to engage in international negotiations over trade and commercial relations between individual states and foreign governments.  There will be no Office of the Trade Representative under the direction of the Office of the President because the authority conferred on Congress to regulate foreign trade in Article I, Section 8 will be amended to reflect strict retrospective consent of state negotiations without any positive federal role.  Authority to engage in international trade negotiations will reside exclusively in the offices of the state governors as extended by the will of the state legislatures and the retrospective consent of Congress.  If we succeed in our broader revision of Article II, then the Office of the President of the United States will continue to exist, but the President will preside over a significantly shrunken administration oriented strictly to satisfying the radically diminished range of Article I, Section 8 enumerated powers of Congress.  Similarly, the President will continue to act as Commander-in-Chief of a significantly reduced military and Chief Diplomat over a diplomatic corp whose duties will be significantly circumscribed to reflect strict maintenance of strategic defense relations.     

The Federal Judiciary and the Fourteenth Amendment

The Article III institutions demand a separate consideration regarding the changes we intend to pursue through amendment of the Constitution and statutory action through Congress, specifically with reference to jurisprudence of the Fourteenth Article of Amendment.  In summary, we will not countenance the incorporation of limitations on the actions of government contained in the first ten Articles of Amendment (i.e. the Bill of Rights), either selectively or in full, against actions undertaken by state legislatures, understood through interpretation of the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment.   Nor will we countenance the creation of wholly new individual rights, nowhere contained in the language of the Constitution, against which our state legislatures will be prohibited from transgressing as a matter of substantive due process.  If we, in the states, are to be sovereign in a union of sovereign states, then we cannot be held hostage by the partisan sway, to and fro, within the federal judiciary concerning the Constitutional limitations to which we will be held bound in all our actions undertaken on the behalf of our democratic electorates.  We will be limited by the force of democracy alone, lawfully executed in the hands of our citizens.    

We could lodge our arguments against the federal judiciary on antiquated but nonetheless valid grounds that the powers of federal jurists reside in an unlawful and unjustified appropriation of authority to review statutory and executive administrative actions in the light of Constitution limitations (Judge Gibson dissent in Eakin v. Raub, 12 Sergeant & Rawle 330 (PA 1825)).  Article III nowhere confers on the federal judiciary the authority to invalidate legislative and executive actions because such actions are incongruous with the limitations on these institutions set either by the Constitution of 1787 or by various state constitutions.  For a community of jurists so concerned with the original intent and construction of the Constitution, it should be disconcerting that its most critical judicial precedent (i.e. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803)) might be wholly unjustified in terms of the expressed language of the Constitution committed to the establishment of the federal judiciary.  On the contrary, there is enough evidence to suggest that the Framers of the Constitution did envision a capacity in the federal judiciary to overrule state legislative and executive actions, if not the actions of Congress and the federal executive branch, strictly in reference to the Supremacy clause and to the expressed limitations on state action contained in Article I, Section 10.  We will grant such a role to the federal judiciary, trim the enumerated powers of Congress to reduce the potential for incongruities between state and federal areas of power, and rewrite the range of limitations on state action that the federal judiciary will be bound to enforce.

The Fourteenth Article of Amendment, its "privileges and immunities" clause, and its due process clause in Section 1 introduce the larger focus of our problem with the federal judiciary.  It is clear that the federal judiciary is bound to enforce the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment against actions by the state governments, that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees enjoyment of the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" against actions by state governments, that state governments are prohibited from depriving persons of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," and that a state government is prohibited from denying "any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."  It is entirely unclear, however, what any of this means.  Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution guarantees that citizens of one state shall be entitled to the "Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States," implying that any citizen of Massachusetts who travels to New York shall be entitle to the privilege and immunities conferred on citizens of New York by its government, on its own terms without discrimination.  The "privileges and immunities" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly means something different: it means to establish the privileges and immunities enjoyed by every citizen of the United States wherever they happen to be standing and, thenceforth, to hold state governments accountable to respect such privileges and immunities.  None of these privileges and immunities are written down and specified anywhere in the language of the Constitution or any of its articles of amendment.  The first ten Articles of Amendment, the Bill of Rights, are not coextensive with this concept.  They are an enumeration of prohibitions on actions undertaken explicitly by Congress, both with regard to individuals and with regard to the powers exercised by the states.  It would be presumptuous at best to argue that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to see the full body of protections from federal action embodied in the Bill of Rights transmogrified into the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States," without expressly saying so.  In the absence of such an expressed definition, the federal judiciary has invented its own definition of the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States applicable against the states over time, adding here, subtracting there, all without expressed Constitutional authority to do so.  It seems clear that, if the federal judiciary is going to hold our state governments accountable to protect the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States," then these privileges and immunities need to be added expressly to the language of the Constitution.  We will commit to adding such language.  Our party's conception of the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" will include the terms of procedural due process (notice of state action, opportunity to be heard, decision of claims by a neutral decision maker), the universal right of suffrage in federal elections to all adult citizens of the United States, and the right of citizens with legal standing to seek redress in the federal judiciary under claims pursuant to the laws of the United States, and there we will conclude our rendition of the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States."

If we are suspicious of the federal judiciary's capacity to expand the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" into a body of limitations on the sovereignty of our states through mechanisms nowhere outlined in expressed language anywhere in the Constitution, then we are similarly dubious of the capacity of the federal judiciary to redefine due process at will to include individual rights nowhere present within any portion of the Constitution inclusive of its articles of amendment, and we question the capacity of the federal judiciary to hold the actions of our state governments to enhanced scrutiny when we transgress such invented, unwritten individual rights.  Substantive due process enjoys a long and dark history in American jurisprudence going back minimally to Dred Scott v. Sanford (60 U.S. 393 (1857)) and the extension of an unwritten right not to be deprived of property in human chattel by anti-slavery enactments.  If the Thriteenth Article of Amendment has put the nefarious holding in Dred Scott permanently to rest, the federal judiciary has since busied itself with discovering other, new, and, still, wholly unwritten rights, somehow implied or derived or contained within "penumbras" of Constitutional provisions against which the actions of states must be held to enhanced scrutiny to determine that individual liberties have not been unduly infringed by the business of public policy in general purpose governments.  For our part, we are cognizant of the reasons for which a guarantee that individuals should enjoy due process was placed within the Fifth Amendment for application against the actions of Congress and for which an identical guarantee was placed in the Fourteenth Amendment for application against the state governments.  It is a basic, fundamental principle of individual liberty, consistent with the development of the Anglo-American legal and constitutional tradition from the signing of the Magna Carta through the passage of the Constitution of the United States, that no individual should be deprived of their life, their liberty, or their property except by the legitimate and transparent exercise of government, and that such legitimacy and transparency demands the existence of clear legal standards on the legality of individual actions, the opportunity to be heard in defense of one's actions against the prosecutorial claims of the state, and arbitration of one's case before a neutral judge of such counterclaims.  This is a procedural guarantee that governments must respect the terms of a process in lawmaking before they criminalize particular actions by individuals, arrest or detain individuals committing such actions, and deprive individuals of their life, liberty, or property in retribution for such criminalized actions committed against the state.  It is not a guarantee that the rights of individuals must include a vast and unwritten corpus of liberties from state interference, defined at will by jurists and subject to perpetually changing, partisan conceptions of individual liberty.  We will insist, in reframing the responsibilities and capacities of the Article III courts, that the meaning and the adjudication of claims with regard to due process, at least with respect to the Fourteenth Amendment, will be henceforth and permanently restricted to questions of governmental procedure and will cease to expand the substance of individual rights or to question the authority of the law giver when the latter has respected its responsibilities to act in accordance with its democratic mandate, subject to its expressed constitutional limitations, which are, in turn, the exclusive jurisdiction of our state judiciaries.   

In so limiting the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" and the expansive terms of substantive due process in the Fourteenth Amendment, we will definitively put an end to the selective incorporation of elements of the Bill of Rights against actions by the state governments, and, if we have to, we will, by amendment, strike, line by line, elements of judicial precedent that hold state governments accountable to specific limitations on actions by Congress and by the federal Executive branch outlined in the Bill of Rights.  Stare decisis will not stop us from regaining the fullest measure of our sovereignty.  We, in the states, will not be held accountable, in the federal judiciary, to First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and freedom of the press by the terms of Gitlow v. New York (268 U.S. 652 (1925)).  If freedom of speech and freedom of the press are essential to the functioning of a democratic polity, then we should include them in our state constitutions and, in Massachusetts, we already have (Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Article LXXVII).  Neither will we be held accountable, in the federal judiciary, to First Amendment protections on freedom of association and assembly by the terms of De Jonge v. Oregon (299 U.S. 353 (1937)).  Recognizing that freedom of assembly is essential both to the basic constitution of community and to the effective exercise of democratic participation in self-governance, we should explicitly include it within our state constitutions to be enforced by our state judiciaries, and, in Massachusetts, we already have (Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Article XIX).  We will also not be held accountable, in the federal judiciary, to First Amendment protections of the free exercise of religion by the terms of Cantwell v. Connecticut (310 U.S. 296 (1940)).  We fully concur that the free exercise of religious belief is of sufficient importance to the moral development of free individuals of conscience and to the maintenance of peaceable, morally grounded communities that it should be explicitly guaranteed in our state constitutions, and, in Massachusetts, it already is (Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Article XLVI).  While we might concede Justice Owen Roberts' argument in the majority opinion of Cantwell that free exercise of religion subsumes both belief and worldly action and that the latter component "remains subject to regulation for the protection of society," we insist that our state jurists should be the final arbiters, according the protections explicitly written in our constitutions, on whether or not regulation of free exercise rights by our state legislatures or by our municipal governments unduly infringe on the rights of believers to act in accordance with their faith.  Emphatically, we will also not be held accountable, in the federal judiciary, to the Second Amendment right of individuals to bear arms for purposes of their own self defense by the terms outlined in McDonald v. City of Chicago (561 U.S. 742 (2010)).  In a context where stare decisis is supposed to carry utmost weight in framing the terms by which cases of Constitutional controversy should be settled, we find the inexplicable shift in Second Amendment jurisprudence between United States v. Miller (307 U.S. 174 (1939)) and District of Columbia v. Heller (554 U.S. 570 (2008)) distinctly perplexing, and, for our part, we do not know whether the Second Amendment is better conceived as a facilitating condition for the maintenance of well regulated militias or as the extension of an individual right to exercise a meaningful self-defense by use of firearms, but we insist that, assuming both these motives are valid, in and of themselves, and represent meaningful extensions of liberty, our state constitutions should codify our support for the right of our citizens to keep and bear arms, allowing our state legislature and judiciaries to resolve such quandaries for themselves, and, in Massachusetts, our constitution already does (Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Part I Article XVII).  We do not need the Bill of Rights to be selectively incorporated against the actions of our Commonwealth, actions already regulated by provisions of our own constitution and held to account against our government by our own judiciary, and we will not countenance the exercise of a veto against the actions of our government by an undemocratic and increasingly partisan judicial institution separate and alien to our sovereign practice of democratic self-rule in Massachusetts.          

In addition, we will insist on scrapping, line by line if necessary, all judicial precedent forged under the expansion of substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.  There will be no invention of an individual right to privacy in reproductive health decisions, either implicit within the broader structure of the Constitution or located in "penumbras" of the Bill of Rights, by a set of justices incapable of adequately marshaling obstetrical and gynecological knowledge to balance the power of the states to manage public health and protect their citizens against the individual rights of women or of reproductive age married couples.  Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113 (1973) and Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479 (1965)) will both be swept into the dustbin of history, and the issues in controversy that they had ostensibly settled will be handed back to the state legislatures for definitive resolution.  If issues in reproductive health are important to the autonomy of women and the proactive practice of family planning, and we think that they are, then we will deal with these issues democratically by statute or amendment of our state constitutions to firmly define the rights of women to a full range of reproductive health options and make birth control universally available.  Similarly, the public sanctification of marital unions, a subject preeminently reserved under the Tenth Amendment to the regulation of the states, will be returned to the exclusive regulation of the states.  Both Loving v. Virginia (388 U.S. 1 (1967)) and Obergefell v. Hodges (576 U.S. 644 (2015)) will be written out of existence as intrusions into the province of state government by the federal judiciary, interpreting a Constitution that provides no federal role in defining the institution of civil marriage.  If marriage equality is a definitive social good, and we believe that it is, then we will write a universal legal privilege for all consenting adult individuals, regardless of gender, gender identity, race, religious affiliation, ethnicity, sexual preference, or physical or emotional condition, to enter into civil marital union in the eyes of our Commonwealth, either by statute or by amendment of our constitution.  Likewise, there will be no judicial recovery of antiquated and despicable conceptions like the liberty of individuals to enter into labor contracts free from governmental interference.  There will never be another Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45 (1905)) or any other attempt to write an extreme libertarian economic bias into the Constitution of 1787 under the federal judiciary by means of the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause for enforcement against state regulatory actions.    

Neither will we accept the utilization of strict scrutiny over the actions of state governments by the federal judiciary in defense of "discrete and insular minorities" through interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause (per United States v. Carolene Products Co. (304 U.S. 144 (1938), majority opinion footnote 4).  If we, in the states, are to champion the causes of equality in terms of race, gender and gender identity, sexual preference, ethnicity, religious affiliation, age, physical, mental, and emotional disability, or any other basis that has heretofore introduced identifiable instances of social discrimination, then our actions must emerge from a democratic consensus on the universal dignity of common humanity and the need to enact statutory protections against discrimination and measures aimed at amelioration of past wrongs committed against targeted minorities.  If our democratically mandated actions do not satisfactorily evince a commitment to protect "discrete and insular minorities," then no opinion by nine unelected jurists in black robes will ever transform the minds and hearts of the citizens who elected us in order to effect the sort of ideological transformation necessary to sustain a permanent remediation of discriminatory state policy except by repeated judicial chastisement, in turn, breeding antipathy toward the federal judiciary as an alien institution, arrayed as an enemy against us and our Commonwealth.  Emphatically, we will set firm boundaries on the federal judiciary and they will never again challenge our sovereignty.          

The Democratic Process and Electoral Reform

In the present universe of American politics, the democratic process and the universal extension of suffrage rights have become preeminent targets for partisan manipulation to stifle and suppress the political influence of certain segments of the broader US population.  This is neither new nor should it be in any sense surprising.  As the population of the US has grown and become increasingly diverse, the rural, conservative, white majority electorate is increasingly being faced by the reality that it will soon be outnumbered by urban, generally liberal and increasingly black and brown populations, bolstered in turn by a long term shift in the demographic composition of immigrant populations away from earlier European sources and toward eastern and south Asian and Latin American nations of origin.  In response, our conservative and reactionary countrymen in the South and in the rural states of the great middle have called upon the legislative trustees of their will at the state level to constrict the terms by which the electoral franchise should be exercised by broad swaths of their populations.  If in previous generations they kept black voters out of the polls by enacting poll taxes or literacy tests or by recourse to the mere threat of armed violence against black citizens with the gall to imagine that they could participate in self governance at equal standing with their white neighbors, then today they fulminate over the integrity of the electoral process and allege the presence of voter fraud, implying that the only way their partisan opponents could ever secure a relative increase in political power within their legislatures and local offices would be through outright cheating.  In essence, they have always rejected in principle that they should ever have to submit to be ruled by a government of democratically elected officials representing the ideals and interests of people who do not look like them, and they mean to reconstruct the institutions of self-government to categorically exclude any such possibility at any point in the future.  

And, today, they enjoy the solicitous approval of a federal judiciary that, at its highest levels, is now inclined increasingly to turn a blind eye to partisan tactics at the state level that are not explicitly targeted to impact the racial makeup of state electorates.  Since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder (570 U.S. 529 (2013)), the federal judiciary has made it expressly clear that the business of protecting the voting rights of discriminated minorities under the terms of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would now be taken away from the federal government and, henceforth, consigned to the same state governments that had so ably restricted the franchise prior to the act's passage.  Pointedly, the establishment of preclearance procedures under the Voting Rights Act, enabling the federal Department of Justice to exercise an effective veto over changes to state level electoral laws, was necessitated by the unwillingness of diverse governmental jurisdictions to respect the terms of the Fifteenth Article of Amendment, guaranteeing a right to vote to all American citizens regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."  The same federal judiciary that overruled the continued necessity of preclearance will now, certainly, allow the most egregious denials of the franchise to an expanding number of American citizens under the guise of protecting the integrity of the vote.  Effectively, they will stand for the perpetuation of permanent minority rule and the further erosion of democratic norms as the US continues to experience a demographic shift of decisive partisan relevance.  

 

It should be clear in regard to what we have heretofore outlined in this document that we regard the franchise in federal electoral contests as fundamental to the institution of citizenship and among the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" referenced in section 1 of the Fourteenth Article of Amendment.  We would, in this sense, hope the federal judiciary would take seriously its responsibility to ensure that the franchise is never denied to American citizens in any federal electoral contest by any state electoral rules.  Conversely, we are equally satisfied that it is far easier to strip the federal judiciary of its responsibilities and to deny them the opportunity to intervene in the electoral policies of sovereign state governments than it is to confer on it the responsibility to be even-handed and non-partisan in its deliberations over electoral politics, especially at this moment in our history.  Sadly, we are dubious of any solution to the elimination of the preclearance procedures of the Voting Rights Act, and we are likewise dubious of any solution to the passage of ensembles of new voting restrictions in the states of the South and of the great middle, otherwise targeting non-white voters for disenfranchisement but, in recognition of the restrictions outlined by the Fifteenth Article of Amendment, not in explicitly racial  terms.  If we, in this party, have our way, then every state will be at liberty to design its own electoral institutions free from the interference of the federal government in general and of the federal judiciary in particular.  In this regard, we will protect the rights of every adult citizen of this Commonwealth to participate freely in federal electoral contests managed by the officials of every city and town in Massachusetts and overseen by our Secretary of the Commonwealth.  If we lack confidence in the willingness of our countrymen in a great many of the other states to ensure the same, then we are minimally satisfied that the federal government will be decisively stripped of authority vis-à-vis the states that any deficit of democracy in federal elections will constitute an ongoing inconvenience to us rather than a permanent crisis hindering fundamental operations of government in which we hold an exaggerated and unnecessary stake.  

         

Fundamentally, we, as a party, will be committed to the expansion and deepening of the democratic process in Massachusetts.  It will not be enough to concentrate political power and responsibility into the hands of our General Court and the Office of the Governor of the Commonwealth and to displace a long list of powers and responsibilities currently in the hands of Congress, the federal Executive branch, and the federal judiciary.  We have to ensure that the process through which our legislative and executive offices are staffed will be fair, open, and subject to the continuous oversight of the voters.  Moreover, we will need to ensure that an informed electorate has more opportunities for direct governance of public policy, including but certainly not limited to the ballot referendum process.  Conversely, we recognize that certain facets of public policy and, in particular, macroeconomic policy management will demand the expertise and commitment of time only available to professional governmental policy makers.  We need to engage in a broader discussion concerning the degree to which we can safely open up the democratic process in policy making to the general electorate of the Commonwealth.  Minimally, at the general level of the Commonwealth, we will investigate the potential to amend the terms of the Article of Amendment XLVIII to the Massachusetts constitution concerning "Initiative Petitions," to increase the capacity for direct governance of public policy through the ballot referenda.  More radically, we may consider the potential for introduction, through the petition process, of an institution of sequestered administrative juries to investigate, conduct hearings with subpoena power, and render decisions on matters of public policy that incite a significant degree of public controversy, as a check on the practices of both the General Court and the Office of the Governor.

Simultaneously, as we move to expand the opportunities of the general electorate of the Commonwealth to exercise direct governance of public policy, we need to consider the dissemination of information and ideas regarding public policy to ensure that a more empowered electorate will also be a more thoroughly and objectively informed electorate.  As a first step in this direction, we will definitively consider the accumulation and investment of private funds to engage in political communications by all available media, including broadcast airwaves and social media platforms.  Emphatically, as with the remaining corpus of federal jurisprudence on the selective incorporation of the First Amendment of the Constitution of 1787 through the Fourteenth Amendment against state action, we will not be held bound to the terms of Citizens United v. FEC (558 U.S. 310 (2010)).  We will consider the accumulation of funds by corporate entities, including non-profit organizations and labor unions, in order to police the dissemination of partisan communications in the broader public interest of our citizens.  If we determine that strict limitations need to be placed on the level of campaign spending by individuals and by corporate entities with respect to particular elections, then we will set such limits.  Moreover, we will consider the use of social media to convey partisan communications and, if necessary, enact criminal penalties on internet platforms that transgress established standards on communications of a partisan nature, especially communications of a false and malicious nature.  

We hold out hope that the electorate of the Commonwealth will approve ballot initiative Two in the 2020 general election to enact ranked-choice voting procedures in federal, state, and regional primary and general elections, to the extent that such procedures demonstrably increase the success of third party candidates.  Manifestly, if the voters of the Commonwealth give us a door that this party can walk through to take on the state Democratic and Republican parties without the necessity that our supporters will be throwing their votes away, then we will be abundantly grateful.  We also recognize the potential of such reforms to reshape the agendas of major parties as they are compelled to appeal to the electorates of minor parties for second tier support.  Any other such electoral reforms that might expand the range of partisan engagement and contestation of public policy in the Commonwealth would certainly be welcomed.  

As we have argued above with respect to our own party organization, we support the conception of ballot lotteries, minimally, for run-off general elections for municipal offices and we will incorporate such methods in lieu of primary contests for all offices contested by our party.  It is worth asking here why would support such a methodology that removes choice from the hands of the voters and turns the selection of office holders over to the luck of the draw.  The ballot lottery method has the manifest advantage of cancelling the efficacy of all campaign expenditures and reducing the influence of charismatic personalities in electorate contests against less gregarious individuals with a greater depth of policy expertise.  Particularly at the municipal level, lotteries negate the influence of local cliques and familial dynasties in local governance, diminishing the potential of government by the popular and lessening the potential creation of career office holders.  Provided we enforce sufficiently rigorous minimal qualifications to offices for inclusion in the lottery process, we are confident that the lottery process would open up municipal governance to a much wider cadre of skilled and experienced aspiring office holders.  In general, we think that such reforms will increase the quality of governance at the municipal level and will expand the overall diversity of candidates for office.    

With regard to the demographic composition of the electorate, we will be concerned to enhance participation of younger people, both in voting and participation within voluntary governmental functions at the local level, but also in candidacies for, especially, municipal offices.  It is worth considering whether and how we might extend the franchise to individuals under the age of eighteen.  On the contrary, it is also worth considering making the right to vote in municipal and state elections, in general, contingent on completion of voter education programs, to ensure that voters will understand their responsibilities as citizens within a democracy.  Our purposes in suggesting voter education is not to disqualify large portions of our electorate, but to definitively guarantee that our citizens universally enjoy a thorough education in civics and embody a commitment to our solidarity as a sovereign democratic state.  We certainly need to ensure that no particular ethnic or racially-defined community in Massachusetts can find themselves effectively excluded and marginalized by the democratic process in the Commonwealth.  Moreover, while we do not know whether the idea of a federal decennial census will go away as we begin to reassess the powers that we are willing to convey to Congress and the federal Executive branch, assuming we continue to apportion representative seats based on decennial census figures, we are intent on ensuring that partisan gerrymandering goes away in Massachusetts in favor of reapportionment through a non-partisan statistical/demographic electoral commission.  We will not crowd low income and/or non-white electoral constituencies into spatially discontinuous districts where their influence on the larger legislative process can be minimized to the benefit of wealthier, whiter populations.  The geographies of our districts will increasingly look more uniform and their demographics will embody a deeper diversity of wealth, racial dynamics, and partisan identifications.  These are ideas that we will have to more fully develop as we move forward in our broader project insofar as we will be involved in the continuous creation of an electorate sympathetic to the creation of a new, sovereign Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  

The Federal Reserve, the Money Supply, and Global Financial System

Every financial system in the world, supporting real macroeconomic systems of production, exchange or distribution, and consumption of goods and services, needs a central bank to maintain control over the supply of money in circulation and, thus, to regulate price levels against the needs for investment and systemic expansion of productive capacities.  In the United States, since the 1910s, the Federal Reserve system has filled this role and, for the most part, has succeeded in its dual, balancing mission to support economic growth and to manage price inflation through monetary policy mechanisms.  Certain extreme moments have led to extreme measures, like the FED's significant monetary retrenchment under Chairman Volcker in the early 1980s and the aggressive post-9/11 reduction of short term interest rates under Chairman Greenspan, but, by and large, the FED has sought to pursue a responsible course of monetary policy over its history.  It is not, therefore, a dissatisfaction with the policy record of the Federal Reserve system or with the evolving position of the US dollar in global currency exchange that prompts us to demand the elimination of the Federal Reserve system and of a unified US dollar.  Rather, it is simply the case that we, in the states, can never be truly sovereign in our exercise of macroeconomic policy and, especially, fiscal policy by our state governments if we do not control the expansion and contraction of own money supplies in relation to our regulation of fiscal expenditures and the various term growth trajectories of our private sectors relative to fluctuations in our own macroeconomies and in global economic activity.  If we continue to accept the US dollar as our medium of exchange in Massachusetts, then we will be forced to strictly regulate our fiscal policies against a rigid monetary constraint and incur the potential for fiscal insolvency if we accumulate significant levels of debt.  As is the case for each of the Euro-zone national economies, our capacity to undertake necessary counter-cyclical fiscal policies, both in the course of macroeconomic downturns and in boom periods, would be utterly handcuffed.  Similarly, continued reliance on the US dollar will subject our state macroeconomy to the myriad effects of fluctuations in real exchange rates relative to foreign currencies caused by the diverse macroeconomic growth trajectories of every other state, by the rate of growth of federal expenditures and the accumulation of federal debt, and by the fiscal initiatives undertaken by every other state government.  The only way to counteract the inherent problems arising from an incongruity between fiscal policy independence among the states and a rigid, centralized institution of monetary policy, is to break up the Federal Reserve system and, thus, to break up the US dollar and introduce sovereign state currencies.  If we, in the states, are to be the primary practitioners of fiscal policy, directed toward the unique needs and interests of our citizens, then there is no other alternative but to scrap the Federal Reserve and set up our own financial and monetary systems.  

We do not take the prospect of throwing everything in our monetary system and, emphatically, the role of the US dollar as a global reserve currency completely up in the air lightly.  However we act in this direction, things will be immensely difficult and uncertain, and the broader impacts of our actions on the global economy and hundreds of millions of wealth portfolios will be gargantuan.  Nonetheless, in our own interests, we have to commit to such changes.  In the wake of the Federal Reserve's elimination, we will have to establish our own central financial reserve system for Massachusetts banks and financial institutions, empowered to purchase and sell sovereign debt issued by the government of the Commonwealth, to accept mandatory deposits from members banks and to enforce capitalization requirements for member banks, to make emergency loans to member banks and to establish the terms for overnight inter-bank loans, and to supervise the operations of banks and financial institutions within the Commonwealth in order to facilitate stable growth of consumer and commercial financing and mitigation of risks to deposit holders and investors.  We will augment the creation of a central reserve system by establishing and clarifying rules for the participation of member banks in the retail marketing of uninsured financial securities and for holding of private debt and equity securities by member banks.  Emphatically, relative to our commercial banks, we do not know if it would be feasible or beneficial or even necessary to re-establish the firewall between commercial and investment banks initially created by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and removed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.  However, if we extend a sufficient degree of oversight power to the central reserve system in policing the finances and capital market engagement of member banks, then we are confident that we can avoid the worst sorts of banking crises that have periodically arisen in American history.  

We acknowledge the importance of monetary policy measures as a significant lever in macroeconomic policy management, in conjunction with fiscal tax and spending policies, and we are confident that we will be able to institute the mechanisms through which our central reserve system can regulate our money supply in Massachusetts, inclusive of fiduciary money issues, timed and demand deposits in member banks, money market funds, and diverse forms of commercial paper consistent with Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) on negotiable instruments.  We, further, acknowledge that monetary policy measures can either reinforce or counteract the effectiveness of fiscal policies by alternately expanding or tightening the growth of the money supply in relation to fiscal measures to withdraw private consumption and investment capacity through taxation or augment consumption and investment through spending.  In this regard, it is clear that the relationship between our fiscal policy authority in the General Court of the Commonwealth and our monetary authority in our central reserve system will demand some degree of consultative coordination in order to ensure that nominally salutary monetary policy independence does not generate utter macroeconomic incoherence.  Emphatically, we want to create a central financial reserve characterized by sober, efficient, and independent judgment in determination and action in approaching monetary policy variables, but we simultaneously recognize that, if our government and monetary authority are not continuously on the same page, then we will never be able to undertake coherent counter-cyclical fiscal policy regimes in response to fluctuations in private sector economic activity.  

In addition to substituting our central bank system for that of the Federal Reserve Bank system, we will also replace the existing structure of deposit insurance on savings, checking, certificates of deposit, and money market accounts under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) with exclusive coverage under the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) of Massachusetts.  Presently, the latter fund covers deposits in excess of the maximum deposit coverage allowed by FDIC although it preexisted the FDIC as an innovation of the Commonwealth from the early 1930s.  If we succeed in displacing the existing monetary and financial structure grounded in the Federal Reserve, then it would similarly necessitate a restructuring of banking deposit insurance funds in order to transfer accountable shares of the federal Deposit Insurance Fund, presently managed under FDIC, to corresponding state level deposit funds or to member banks if individual state governments choose not to create a replacement deposit insurance fund.  In addition to its already existing DIF balances and periodic assessments from member banks, transferred balances from the federal Deposit Insurance Fund will combine to constitute the full balance of the Massachusetts DIF, available for distribution to depositors in case of bank failure.  We will, additionally, empower the administrative authorities of the Massachusetts DIF to take possession of the assets and liabilities of failed member banks for resolution of debts and repayment of deposit holders in excess of deposit insurance limits.  

Our central reserve system will hold its issuance of a fiduciary currency for use as the medium of exchange for the macroeconomy of the Commonwealth as its primary systemic liability, and, if we act as sufficiently responsible and disciplined managers of fiscal policy in the interest of our citizens, then we would expect that our citizens will accept the currency issues of our central reserve as a stable measure of everyday market pricing and as a store of individual wealth holdings in Massachusetts as we transition away from the US dollar.  It is evident that at least some price controls or fixed exchange rates between US dollar denominated assets and quantities of Massachusetts currency issues may be necessary at the outset as we phase out the everyday utilization of the US dollar in Massachusetts, but we are committed to the principle that, in the long run, nominal pricing across our macroeconomy will realize a stable equilibrium level on its own without significant state regulation of market outcomes.  None of this is going to be simple and without significant short term rigidities and problems, but if we succeed in the crucial task of moving away from the US dollar, then we will be the sole masters of our own future economic development, both in relation to our collective governmental expenditures and investments and to those of our private sector.      

Capital Markets, Securitization, and the Quandaries of Public Regulation

If the private market economy of the Commonwealth is to continue to operate and to be a haven for the entrepreneurial energies of our creative citizens, then we will need to have institutions for the accumulation of private investable capital funds, subject to thorough vetting of investment opportunities against risk of loss to investors.  One piece of this larger necessity would obviously be served through the creation of a central financial reserve system, linking and safeguarding the solvency of commercial banks and other community institutions (e.g. credit unions) for savings and the retail issuance of consumer and commercial loans, including primary residential mortgage loan issuance.  Beyond our banking system, however, we will need investment banks and the sorts of securities markets that will enable our entrepreneurs and firms to securitize and redistribute the risks and returns to corporate debt and equity shares in order to efficiently accumulate and distribute investment capital.  

With regard to the existing federal institutions governing securities markets, we certainly need to learn from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) regulation of capital market activity, especially its acquisition of legally mandated information on corporate entities contingent on their issuance of securities and financial derivatives.  On the other hand, we decline to support the continued operation of federal regulatory authorities over capital market activities.  We will support the elimination of the SEC and the CFTC, contingent on replacement of their regulatory oversight functions over Massachusetts corporations with a state level commission.  If we can achieve these ends, then we will create a regulatory arm of the Massachusetts government with direct authority to prescribe administrative penalties, without recourse to the judicial system, against corporate agents who demonstrably violate the codes of financial market conduct that we enact in the interest of protecting the integrity of our financial markets.  We will also empower our regulatory authority to participate in the criminal prosecution of corporate executives for whom a defined role participating in circumscribed activities can be identified.  We will certainly penalize insider trading and the issuance of financial securities under fraudulent circumstances relative to the informational filings of concerned corporate entities and define administrative and criminal penalties for such activities.          

In the course of our larger consideration of federal administrative bodies to be eliminated and replaced as we pursue a devolved vision of federalism, it is worth asking whether we will need a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).  This agency emerged from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, passed in the wake of the mortgage market meltdown crisis of the 2000s, and its creation sought to accentuate the purposes of overseeing consumer financial operations to protect home buyers involved in the mortgage process, credit card users accumulating personal debt, and small investors engaging in the use of retail financial services to manage portfolio investments, all processes otherwise under the purview of other federal agencies that had, apparently, been performed inadequately prior to CFPBs formation.  CFPB also generates educational materials to inform the public on financial sector activities and to assist borrowers and small investors to recognize scams and fraudulent activities.  On its face, there may be substantial valid reasoning to establish an agency for the expressed purposes of overseeing certain aspects of the financial sector's engagement with the general public to ensure that financial sectors agents do not abuse the trust they are accorded by their clients.  More generally, we would certainly want to produce educational materials for the citizens of this Commonwealth both to inform small investors and households taking on consumer debt of the risks involved in their engagement with the financial sector and to provide points of contact with state regulators for reporting misconduct by firms or individuals in the financial sector.  On the other hand, we would question whether the creation of such an agency would tend to create a motivation for excessively zealous regulation of otherwise legal activity by commercial banks, mortgage lenders, credit card issuers, financial service professionals, and investment banks.  

Clearly, activities like pay-day lending that are prone to abuse should remain subjects of rigorous regulation, particularly with respect to interest rates charged to borrowers.  It is evident that we will need state regulators in place to ensure that licensed financial services professionals are not engaged in transparently fraudulent activities, like Ponzi schemes, but we need to acknowledge that there may be a fine line between fraud and prudent marketing of inherently risky financial instruments with adequate notification of clients regarding the risks involved in their investments.  We certainly need professionals capable of knowing the difference between criminal misbehavior by financial sector agents and simply poor performance in the interest of clients. An evident question in our mind remains, however, as to whom should we invest with the authority to regulate targeted financial sector activities.  Insofar as we are leery of the idea of over-regulating the financial sector, especially in the supposed interests of small investors, we would oppose the creation of a dedicated agency to oversee capital investment services.  In many cases, the Bureau of Public Protection and Advocacy of the Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth should remain the logical locus for vesting enhanced responsibilities for enforcement of legal standards on financial sector activities, for publicizing the role of the government of the Commonwealth as overseer of the state's financial sector, and for educating the public to ensure that borrowers and small investors understand the risks involved in dealing with the financial sector.  In these terms, we are comfortable with the elimination of CFPB and the replacement of its functions by agencies already in existence in Massachusetts.

The idea of establishing a public investment fund, assembling private capital from savers throughout the Commonwealth to invest in diverse portfolios of public projects and, perhaps, a select range of small, private entrepreneurial initiatives from corners of our population otherwise ignored by traditional sources of venture capital, is worth examining.  Our closest conceivable blueprint for such a public fund might be the Caisse de dépôt et placement of Québec, except that, in distinction from this institution, we would intentionally seek to privilege public projects and a privileged set of small-scale domestic private projects in our imagination of a public investment fund.  Such a fund would, in essence, operate as a derived fixed income source, compensating investors with distributions derived from interest payments on government securities, issued by the government of the Commonwealth, municipalities, and other governmental entities within Massachusetts.  In addition, were we to provide capital for private projects, we might privilege entrepreneurship by racial and ethnic minorities and also for non-conventional enterprises, especially workers' cooperatives and other types of enterprise privileging democratic principles of ownership, management, and oversight.  Rather than take an explicit equity stake in such projects, we would partner with entrepreneurs to develop durable business models, capable of sustaining a long term positive revenue flow and carving a durable share in target markets relative to competitors.  In this manner, fund managers might become actively involved in developing market engagement strategies and, subsequently, in planning a long term schedule for repayment of financial obligations to shareholders based on the long term performance and gross earnings of fund partners.  Our larger goal in the establishment of such a fund would be to give private investors a readily available public option for diversified, publicly-centered investments to provide relatively conservative, reliable returns.  Secondarily, to the extent that we would enable the financing of diverse, smaller scale private entrepreneurial ventures, at diverse levels of risk, that might have otherwise been closed out of traditional financing sources, we may give a leg up to non-traditional entrepreneurs and to previously marginalized communities, under conditions that might favor risk-taking with an expectation that minor short term stumbles will not invariably doom an otherwise viable business plan.  

While we do not advocate placing significant hurdles in the path of investors to pursue well reasoned and deliberate strategies of portfolio investment in their own interests and in those of the recipients of their financial support, we simultaneously recognize that the pursuit of private capital market investments largely involves individuals who have amassed significant stores of personal wealth and who can bear some greater measure of personal financial burden in the interest of supporting the fiscal viability of their government and the well being of their less affluent neighbors.  In addition to the other measures advocated in this section, we would advocate the introduction of a modest tax on financial transactions, to be exacted as a sales and service tax against every assessment by financial service firms levied on investors, perhaps in the range of eight to ten percent of the value of each service assessment.  We might consider, in this regard, enabling investors below a certain threshold level of annual personal income to waive such a tax or deduct it from their yearly income tax returns to the Commonwealth.  On the other hand, in the broader spirit of supporting progressive taxation, a tax on financial services of the form described here would overwhelmingly fall onto the backs of those in our Commonwealth most able to bear the burden that we have asked of them, enabling us to reduce or eliminate a range of value added sales and excise taxes overwhelmingly levied on households least able to bear their expense and inflicting ancillary transactions costs for other industries who would benefit from their removal.  We will work to develop yearly reporting requirements by financial service firms to ensure that the execution of such a tax cannot be easily evaded by our wealthiest citizens, seeking to avoid tax compliance by working with financial managers outside of our legal jurisdiction.  We are confident that a sufficiently modest degree of taxation, in this respect, will not deter our citizens from following a prudent course of portfolio investment to augment their personal wealth and fund entrepreneurial projects that have made their best case of their long term potential returns.  

       

Having outlined our broader intentions for the regulation of capital markets in Massachusetts, it is evident that many corporate entities in the Commonwealth will continue to market their securities through exchanges outside of our jurisdiction, like the New York Stock Exchange, and, in this respect, we will do our best to collect information and undertake such actions as may be necessary to assist regulators in other jurisdictions to police the actions of such corporations in their marketing of securities.  On the other hand, we want to reinforce the broader argument that every additional roadblock in the path of entrepreneurial agents seeking to accumulate capital for potentially viable and innately risky ventures simply strangles the functionality of free capital markets.  We cannot be so copious in overseeing the actions of our private sector to defend against fraud and protect small investors that we render all innovation and every risky opportunity for a profit-making venture moribund, murdered by red tape, piles of regulatory filings, and obscure regulatory determinations by public officials ignorant of the particular circumstances associated with marketing strategies of private firms.  At the end of the day, we will be left to police flagrant violations by corporate actors while individual investors, equipped with incomplete representations on the profitability of investments opportunities that will only pay off in the distant future, navigate ranges of portfolio investments under the precautionary principle that diversification is the safest play when dealing with uninsured securities trading.  We cannot baby our citizens when they approach financial markets as investors looking for a big payoff.  We are not even going to try.  To the extent that we are able to facilitate the development of securities exchanges in Massachusetts, our regulation of such markets will be liberal and oriented, most critically, to support the accumulation of capital for risky projects in the absence of blatant, flagrant violations of established standards for disclosure of risks to investors.        

The Status of Firearms and the Second Amendment

In accordance with our previous considerations on the federal judiciary and our problems with selective incorporation of the Bill of Rights against state actions, we consider the institution of an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, enforceable by the federal judiciary against state governmental actions through the Fourteenth Amendment, categorically inconsistent with our capacity to engage in sovereign democratic self-government.  We reject both the terms of District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, and we will not be held bound by the line of judicial reasoning contained in these decisions or by any further judicial ruling incorporating Second Amendment protections of individuals against actions by the states.  As we argue above, our government will be held accountable to the terms of our own constitution in its protection of the rights of citizens to keep and bear arms, but the literal context of these restrictions on the actions of our government must be fully recognized within our judiciary.  Part I, Article XVII of the Massachusetts constitution outlines the protection of the right of citizens to keep and bear arms for the purposes of the common defense, effectively in the same terms as the Second Amendment of the US Constitution as it had been understood before the Heller decision.  Interpreted in these terms, as Second Amendment provisions had been in United States v. Miller, our constitution provides us with precious little guidance on the rights or privileges of citizens to keep and bear firearms for the purposes of individual self-defense.  

We intend, for our part, to recognize that firearms may have a place within a well ordered society to the extent that we recognize the need for regulation.  We will scrap existing federal licensing structures for firearm ownership and replace them with licensing of all individuals who wish to purchase firearms through the Massachusetts State Police.  We will additionally require that all prospective firearms owners take publicly regulated or otherwise publicly managed classes on firearm safety as a condition of holding an active firearms license and that such training be repeated at least biannually.  No individual without a license will be authorized to purchase a firearm within the Commonwealth.  We will license all firearms dealers within a central registry and hold dealers accountable for their firearms sales and criminally liable for the unauthorized transfer of firearms to individuals lacking a state license.  We will mandate that all firearms purchases be preceded by a twenty-four hour waiting period for investigation of purchasers and to forestall non-premeditated utilization of lethal weapons by individuals in a questionable mental or emotional state who might otherwise use such weapons rashly.  Lastly, we will maintain a registry of firearms and firearm accessories prohibited from sale within the Commonwealth.  We will ban high capacity magazines for semi-automatic rifles and handguns.  We will ban particular munitions, including armor piercing small arms rounds.  

Beyond the specifics of firearm regulations that we will be inclined to enact into statutory law, we need to briefly consider our larger standpoint toward the prevalence of firearms possession, both legal and illicit, across the population of the Commonwealth and, additionally, the relevance of a wide institution of firearms possession on local governance and law enforcement practices.  Strictly speaking, the more guns there are within a population, the greater the threat exists to the safety of law enforcement officers serving to maintain the peace.  In turn, law enforcement officers, faced with the prospect that suspects will likely possess the capacity to use deadly force in resisting arrest, will be more likely to resort to deadly force in confronting suspects.  If we are going to seriously address the utilization of deadly force by law enforcement officers, particularly against discrete ethnic or racial communities, then, in some way, shape, or form, we will need to address the availability of firearms to the general population in order to reduce the prevalence of firearms possession by individuals outside of the law enforcement community.  As such, we will commit to a regulation of firearms possession in Massachusetts that will balance the legitimate needs of individuals to practice a meaningful self-defense of their persons and property against the needs of the state to maintain the peace and ensure the safety of those officials we task with the duty to enforce the law and with whom we confer the authority to use deadly force.  

Black Lives Matter: Our Place in the Permanent Revolution for the Dignity of Common Humanity

Our Commonwealth has a long and very mixed history in the revolution to liberate African-Americans, first against slavery and subsequently against discrimination and racialist oppression.  If, in one sense, we can recall the participation of Massachusetts citizens in the early American abolitionist movement and supportive of the egalitarian purposes of Southern reconstruction, then we also need to admit to the particular ways in which we have marginalized African-Americans in our Commonwealth.  From the earliest moments of the black exodus from the South, we crowded black populations in deteriorating housing stock and consigned black children to inadequate educational facilities.  And when we attempted to ameliorate such conditions, we exposed black citizens to the wrath of poor whites, desperate to hold on to the last vestiges of their privileges.  We were never a party to the legacy of Jim Crow, but we made up for it by allowing the economics of labor market discrimination, financial red lining of neighborhoods, and the economic balkanization of educational district funding keep large segments of our black underclass perpetually at the bottom.  And, yes, we have also allowed law enforcement officers, particularly in cities like Springfield, to discriminate against non-whites in the exercise of their duties.  It cannot constitute self-hate to exhaustively inquire into how we have acted to undermine the liberty of African-Americans and the basic sanctity of Black Lives and to inquire into the ways that we might effect a repentance for our faults.  We need to comprehensively consider how our institutions have contributed to undermining the life expectations of African-Americans and how such institutions need to change.

Certain institutional measures are basic to validation of the arguments made by the Black Lives Matter movement relative to law enforcement agencies.  First, we will rewrite the terms of qualified immunity for individual law enforcement officers from civil lawsuits in state courts for violation of the rights of criminal suspects.  We will codify a detailed list of proscribed actions for which officers will be barred from using a qualified immunity defense in state court, in the interest of both circumscribing the opportunities to utilize qualified immunity and to clearly communicate to law enforcement agencies in Massachusetts under circumstances they will be compelled to defend the terms of their actions by before civil juries against plaintiffs whose rights have allegedly been violated.  We will, similarly, codify a list of actions, applicable to all law enforcement agencies in the Commonwealth, for which officers may be held criminally liable, especially concerning the use of deadly force.  Law enforcement officers need clear and transparent legal parameters to govern their actions, even to the extent that we recognize the actions of law enforcement officers are accompanied by particular stresses and the need to apply discretionary judgment in rapid, tense environments where their lives may be endangered.  Police officers in the field will act as they have been trained, and law enforcement agencies need to do a better job training officers to employ deadly force in a much more circumscribed manner.  Furthermore, we need to pay significant attention to reform of the criminal justice system both in the interest of addressing disproportionalities in the treatment, especially, of young African-American men and, more generally, reconfiguring our approach to criminal justice in order to privilege the greater interests of maintaining public safety over achieving public retribution for criminal activities or, more insidiously, social control of target populations.  We will further develop our approach to criminal justice reform below, but it is worth noting that the interest of preventing large segments of the African-American male population in the Commonwealth from languishing for years of confinement in state correctional institutions will be paramount in our minds.   

The status of African-Americans in the Commonwealth cannot be strictly limited to concerns regarding the relationship of Blacks to law enforcement and criminal justice.  There are significant issues in availability of access to high quality basic health care, a matter of extreme urgency during the course of a pandemic that has disproportionately ravaged non-white communities in Massachusetts and elsewhere across the United States.  In particular, we need to consider the problem of geographic proximity between predominantly African-American neighborhoods and level one medical trauma centers, directly addressing, among other things, firearms violence.  Such problems will constitute a single dimension in our larger consideration of intensive urbanist design in the Commonwealth.  We also need to concentrate some attention on the obstetrical/gynecological health of African-American women, who experience complications in pregnancy and child birth at substantially higher rates that white women.  Black newborns, in turn, suffer substantially higher risks of preterm birth and premature death.  The prevalence of chronic health conditions among African-American adults like diabetes, obesity, and cardio-vascular conditions needs to be addressed within our health care system as a significant issue of racial disparity.  Likewise, the mental and emotional health needs of individuals in African-American communities and, especially, of young black males deserves serious attention, both as an effect of generalized racial discrimination and racial discrimination by law enforcement officers, in particular, and as an effect of income inadequacies and the impact of inter-generational transmissions of poverty.  Remediation of the circumstances nurturing the relative disempowerment  of African-Americans in the Commonwealth will, necessarily, address public health and redistibutive economic policies to ensure that African-Americans are not left behind as our macroeconomy evolves.

  

There are significant pertinent issues with the availability of high quality primary and secondary education and access to public higher education, both in vocational training and liberal arts as a pathway to the professions.  We need to consider the health of urban communities and the means through which non-white and lower income populations can achieve residential mobility, even as we reconsider the broader distribution of residential communities across the Commonwealth, suburban sprawl, and the deterioration of housing and commercial stock in urban areas.  More generally, how do we support a revival of economically dynamic cities in order to ensure that those most marginalized urban populations can fully partake of new opportunities for enrichment?  The answer to this question resides in the coordinated actions of private sector entrepreneurial actors, community organizations and activists, and multi-jurisdictional governmental actors.  Finally, as suggested earlier, we need to consider the construction of representative districts in the Commonwealth to give non-white communities proportional representation in our General Court and in our Congressional delegation.  Simply stated, if we seek, as a party, to truly address the broader revolution that Black Lives Matter represents, then we will need to contemplate the wide range of issues that have prevented African-Americans, and other marginalized populations across our Commonwealth, from being full and equal members in our economy, our cultural life, and our democratic project.  

Maintenance of Public Order and Civil Peace and Inter-jurisdictional Law Enforcement

Apart from the specific measures we have enumerated in the previous section of this document, intended to address some of the more egregious wrongs committed by law enforcement agencies against non-white populations, we need to address some of the other arguments advanced, in particular, by the Black Lives Matter movement and by other movements, especially in regard to the policing of immigrant populations, relative to law enforcement.  What, specifically, is implied in the idea of de-funding law enforcement agencies, and how might such de-funding promote other important social goals?  Moreover, to the extent that we, as a party, seek to be intimately engaged in community organizing, how might we be uniquely suited to replace a range of functions currently performed by law enforcement agents, especially at the municipal level?  We can offer some provisional answers to these questions.  First, it is that, in our municipalities, police departments are not going away, nor will police unions be dispatched from their roles as official bargaining agents and defenders of the police in public policy discourse.  Conversely, in most places, the scale of municipal police departments will be diminished as the functional duties of law enforcement officers become circumscribed.  We certainly need officers, equipped with adequate technologies and tactics, to maintain the peace and apprehend and detain violent criminals.  We want such officers to be equipped with the means to use deadly force if they need to in order to ensure their own safety as they do what we have called upon them to do.  And, alternatively, we want them to be employed as rarely as possible and to assume a near state of invisibility within their communities.  The police will act exclusively as our armed and well equipped enforcers of the peace, not as the immediate outward expression of the state, as a sovereign democratic polity of free citizens, and not as our universally active agency of initial response in the interactions of municipalities with their residents.  There will be no beat cops in the neighborhood, forging daily relationships with the locals or constituting the butt of doughnut shop humor.  The men and women equipped with firearms, body armor, and riot control weapons will be kept in reserve to be mobilized and deployed when an armed response to a civil disturbance or a violent criminal action is strictly required.   

Moreover, in our municipalities, we may institute elected civilian control boards to develop local rules of operation for armed law enforcement agencies, under the principle that officers must be used sparingly, that they should be deployed when other community resources cannot be called upon to respond to disturbances, violations of the peace, or violations of the law, and, when they are deployed, that they should be adequately equipped with both the tools necessary to perform their jobs and to keep themselves safe and with the procedural methodologies that will enable the same and minimize the potential for collateral damage and ancillary harm to civilians.  Such boards will also be vested with the authority to undertake investigations into misconduct by individual officers, to undertake broader investigations into systemic deviations from established rules of operations, and prescribe penalties in such circumstances.  In these terms, while we fully sympathize with the broader criticisms advanced by the Black Lives Matter movement and its supporters regarding police departments, we remain confident that there is a place for armed law enforcement officers provided that their utilization is subject to limitations and to strict community control and oversight.  

Effectively, we will need to develop a range of other municipal respondents to the needs of residents, some of whom will be professionals under the employment or, minimally, contracted by municipal governments.  Among these, educated and qualified social workers will be needed to continuously and proactively address individuals with emotional and/or substance abuse problems.  Others will be professional case managers for our parole system, supervising and coordinating the rehabilitation of criminal offenders outside of our prison system.  Many others will be community volunteers, called upon to effect conflict resolution or otherwise to surveil their neighbors and identify contexts in which we may need to call upon armed police officers to intervene where community mediators are unable to resolve pressing social concerns without recourse to repressive violence.  In all these circumstances, our broader concern is to find ways to substitute other agents, equipped with social service skills and alternative interventionist methodologies absent the use of weapons, to address the underlying sources of social pathology and of criminal behavior in order to minimize the demands that we place on law enforcement.  

Proceeding to a higher echelon of law enforcement, we will call upon the Massachusetts Department of State Police to undertake all of the duties for which it is currently responsible, including security of key state facilities and infrastructures throughout the Commonwealth, enforcement of traffic laws, support for municipal police departments when requested, provision of criminal investigative services, and investigation of criminal firearms trafficking in the Commonwealth.  We will, further, task the State Police with broader management of our firearms ownership control system, including facilitation of public firearms training courses, in the interest of both maintaining thorough control of legal access to firearms by private individuals within the Commonwealth and to ensure that law abiding citizens who want to purchase and maintain legal ownership of firearms have a clear, transparent, and efficient mechanism to obtain a state authorized license.  We will task the State Police to operate all officer training both for their own officers and for municipal police departments across the Commonwealth, developing unique curricula and training standards for each training course based on the needs of subject departments.  In regard to municipal departments, we regard the centralization of officer training in the hands of the State Police as a key measure in minimizing the fiscal expenses incurred by municipalities to develop their own basic training programs for officers.  Lastly, we may task the State Police to replace the role currently assigned through the federal government to the Transportation Security Administration, of performing security screening functions at transportation terminals and executing security operations at airports, seaports, train terminals, and over transportation infrastructure networks.  We are confident in the capacity of the Department of State Police to take on these duties if suitably and consistently provided with the fiscal resources to secure their completion, and, in a broader sense, we recognize that there will continue to be a place for a significant law enforcement establishment at this level as the Commonwealth moves forward toward a deeper degree of sovereignty.      

As we argue above, we fully intend to get the federal government out of the law enforcement business.  We acknowledge, in this regard, that, even if no manifest Constitutional basis should exist for a Federal Bureau of Investigation, it would be very helpful for most of the states to have central hub for collection of information between the law enforcement communities in each of the states and to coordinate actions between various law enforcement agencies at the state level, particularly in dealing with criminal investigations that may implicate national security concerns.  Truthfully, there are too many reasons why we will need to keep an FBI with circumscribed duties, responsibilities, and organizational manpower in operation.  Similarly, we will need to develop the sorts of federal resources that will facilitate the operations of law enforcement at the level of the states, in particular, as criminal suspects cross state lines in defiance of particular states' law enforcement officers.  We will need interstate cooperation on extradition of criminal suspects to face charges within outside jurisdictions.  Much of this will have to play itself out in direct discussions between state executive agencies, especially between state police and prosecutorial agencies, without any recourse to or assistance from the federal government.  This will remain the case if and when we eliminate the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and other components of the United States Department of Justice.  In the end, we will make manifest the extent to which the federal government has represented an utterly superfluous and unnecessarily intrusive partner in the functioning of law enforcement.  

The place of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, as components in the federal law enforcement community of the United States Department of Homeland Security, deserves separate consideration.  Border protection is obviously not going to go away.  Every seaboard state, like Massachusetts, and those states that border Canada and Mexico will need to patrol their borders to ensure that they are not being transgressed either by migrants or by drug cartels or by potential terrorists.  We have already asserted that we will renounce any controlling claim to police our coastline to the federal government, through the agency of the United States Navy and Coast Guard.  On the contrary, when unauthorized individuals step onto our shores, they are standing on our own sovereign soil, and we will not renounce our authority to either police and deport them or to offer them shelter and asylum without either the help or the interference of the federal government.  Immigration will be our prerogative, subject only to the retrospective authorization of Congress.  Likewise, we will police the transshipment of goods into our jurisdictions and the collection of customs duties exclusively set by our legislative determination.  There will be no federal Customs and Border Protection agents on our soil or that of any other state.  Nor will there be Enforcement and Removal agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in our towns or our courthouses, waiting to apprehend undocumented individuals against the will of our citizens to constitute our Commonwealth as a haven for working people seeking to make a better life for themselves and for victims of political oppression or religious bigotry hoping to find solace in our liberty.  Our states will wholly replace their functions, and we will eliminate the larger Department of Homeland Security, retaining, of course, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and, as security for executive officials, the Secret Service to serve as independently functioning executive agencies under the direct authority of the President and under Congressional oversight.  The moment of federal law enforcement will meet its end when the hour of our sovereignty has arrived. 

Finally, there is one further, and critical, dimension in law enforcement, related to the Constitutional division of powers and responsibilities between the federal and state governments.  How will we hold the various components of Constitutional protections for criminal suspects in the custody of our law enforcement agencies?  The corpus of criminal protections, emanating from the enumerated restrictions on actions by Congress in the Bill of Rights, largely took form through the actions of the federal judiciary, and, especially, the Supreme Court, over the course of the Twentieth century, with its first great expansion in the discrete moments of the Scottsboro cases of the 1930s and its larger expansion beginning with the Warren Court in the 1960s.  These moments are hallowed for any defenders of the rights of accused individuals, rights that were codified into the Constitution of 1787 because its framers were men who, ten years previously, would have been held as criminal suspects by the British Crown for their actions as patriots to the cause of liberty and democratic self-rule.  We sympathize with these perspectives.  However, we, in the states, will not be held accountable by the federal judiciary to the terms of Powell v. Alabama (287 U.S. 45 (1932)), regarding the responsibility of states to inform criminal defendants of their right counsel in capital cases and to assign counsel to indigent defendants, or to the terms of Gideon v. Wainwright (372 U.S. 335 (1963), generalizing the ruling in Powell v. Alabama to indigent defendants in all criminal proceedings.  Acknowledging that, at present, Massachusetts does not authorize capital punishment and that we are unlikely to do so in the future if we have our way, we have a structure of protections in place in our General Laws, executed through the terms of our Rules of Criminal Procedures, to establish the conditions under which the Commonwealth is required to supply criminal defendants with counsel.  These conditions reference state and federal judicial precedent, including Powell v. Alabama and Gideon v. Wainwright.  They do not do so out of compulsion, but because they are reasonable standards for a system of law enforcement that is committed to the principle that due process requires a fair hearing for any individual held to account by the state for criminal violations of the law and that the daunting complexities of criminal procedure require that any individual accused by the state be supplied with competent legal counsel.  Nor will we be held accountable in the federal courts to the terms of Miranda v. Arizona (384 U.S. 436 (1966)), establishing a requirement that police inform criminal suspects of their Constitutional rights to remain silent during interrogation and to secure or otherwise be assigned counsel.  The rights of criminal suspects enforced by the Warren Court in the Miranda decision expressly referenced the Fifth Amendment protection of individuals against self-incrimination.  Criminal defendants in Massachusetts already have such a protection against self-incrimination through the constitution of the Commonwealth, and its terms might equally be interpreted to conclude that a failure of law enforcement officials to inform suspects of their right to remain silent would constitute a substantive violation of an individual's immunity from self-incrimination under the constitution of the Commonwealth.  We do not need the federal judiciary to tell us that our police officers should be advising criminal suspects of their rights at the time of their arrest.  Our own state judiciary could have done so independently of any reference to the Constitution of 1787 or its articles of amendment.  

Likewise, while the broader corpus of federal jurisprudence concerning the admissibility of evidence and the legality of searches and seizures will always stand to illuminate a path forward for our state jurists in resolving matters when questions arise in the practices of our law enforcement officers, our General Court will be the final judge, in reference to our own constitutional limitations on the powers of law enforcement, of whether evidence has been obtained illegally and must be discarded in prosecutorial hearings.  Moreover, we intend to seriously interrogate the legality of evidence obtained from routine traffic stops by law enforcement officers, the circumstances meriting traffic stops generally, and the conditions under which law enforcement officers may order operators to vacate their vehicles to be physically searched.  We acknowledge, in this respect, that traffic stops constitute a potential threatening situation to the well being of law enforcement officers, and, in this respect, we would be merited in limiting, by statute, the circumstances in which law enforcement officers would be empowered to undertake a traffic stop in general and outlining, by statute, the procedural protections available to ensure the safety of law enforcement officers in such circumstances.  We will not be held bound to the permissive standards for law enforcement officers outlined in either Pennsylvania v. Mimms (434 U.S. 106 (1977)) or Whren v. United States (517 U.S. 806 (1996)).  Rather, we will author our own statutory standards on these matters and, further, contemplate how we, in the Commonwealth, might be capable of leveraging technology to render any direct role for law enforcement officers in traffic control redundant and wholly unnecessary in all but the most extreme circumstances.  

If our General Court must, further, step in to codify enhanced protections of criminal suspects or to establish more practical or simplified guides for the actions of police officers, then we will take it upon our own hands to redefine the terms of criminal protections in our laws and in our constitution.  We resolutely believe in the larger purpose embodied in the complete ensemble of criminal protections established by the federal judiciary in reference to the terms of the Bill of Rights, but we cannot open up the door to allow the federal judiciary to expand or contract the institution of protections for criminal suspects within our jurisdiction at will and without our direction or our consent.  Such a permission would wholly abrogate our capacity to act as sovereign over our own affairs.  We will hold our own officers to account for violations of the rights of criminal suspects as we see fit, and the federal judiciary can stand back and console itself that the longer history of the expansion of criminal protections emerging within our Constitutional tradition, centrally grounded in the decisions of the federal judiciary, has so strongly and justifiably influenced our unique and sovereign approach to law enforcement.          

Health Insurance and Health Care

In the midst of a pandemic that has idled millions of workers across the country and tens of thousands in our Commonwealth, depriving the unemployed of employer sponsored health insurance policies, it is evident that this primary mechanism for obtaining health insurance, within a macroeconomic context in which health care expenditures on procedures and pharmaceutical medications absorb a larger share of gross domestic product than in any other advanced macroeconomic system, must be replaced.  The legal reliance on employer sponsored health insurance, built into the structure of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and, before it, into Chapter 111M of the General Laws of the Commonwealth, has not only saddled our private sector with the immense and growing financial burden of providing individuals with health care coverage but it has tied individuals to particular employers and subjected them to courses of uncertainty in the proactive management of their health as their employers switch from one relatively expensive plan to another in a futile quest to manage a steadily increasing component of labor expenses.  All of this manifests itself as a nonsensical construction of rigidities into our labor markets relative to other advanced macroeconomies and a perpetual imposition into the lives of working people, who might otherwise be more selective in their occupational choices if they did not have to obtain and keep continuous health insurance coverage.  Combined with the existing but prohibitively expensive nature of short term Continuation of Health Coverage (COBRA) benefits, falling wholly on individuals who leave or are otherwise idled from employment with a particular employer, it is evident that the centrality of employer sponsorship as the primary mechanism through which individuals receive health insurance coverage in our Commonwealth must end and be replaced with a structure that does not tie health insurance and, thus, access to affordable health care to employment.  Moreover, acknowledging the motivations for both our health insurance reform and that of the federal government in management of systemic expenses arising from the uncompensated use of health care resources by uninsured individuals, we need to replace a system reliant on employer sponsorship with a structure that provides universal health insurance coverage without relying on labor market mechanism.     

There are two general ways to achieve universal health insurance coverage without reliance on employer sponsorship.  First, we could expand the individual mandate for uninsured individuals to purchase individual or family health insurance policies on a state sanctioned marketplace to mandate that all households in the Commonwealth will now be required to purchase their own policies, completely eliminating any functional role for employer sponsorship within the health insurance marketplace.  Second, we could make health insurance a benefit of citizenship, paid for collectively through state income taxes and conferred on all individuals regardless of income and employment status.  In the latter case, we would entirely eliminate the marketplace for private health insurance policies except, perhaps, as a source of supplemental insurance for procedures not otherwise covered within the public, tax-financed system.  At present, we cannot present a definitive argument on behalf of either of these options, but we must acknowledge both as options to be entertained.  

We have had a state sanctioned marketplace for subsidized health insurance policies since 2006, the Commonwealth Health Connector, and we believe that our marketplace could be suitably reconfigured to enable the entire population of the Commonwealth to purchase individual and family health insurance policies consistent with established minimum coverage criteria through the Health Connector.  Effectively, if we pursued this option, then we would be allowing select private health insurance providers to market policies through the Connector, with varying thresholds of tax-subsidization based on the incomes of individual purchasers, and to construct very large and well diversified risk pools of policy holders in order to manage associated expenditures to purchasers from underwriting and to manage the risks for substantial reimbursement costs to insurers.  It would have the advantage of maximizing individual choice in the selection of health insurance policies with particular provisions, options for up front (premium) expenses rather than downstream (co-payment/co-insurance) expenses, and excluded procedures (e.g. coverage for particular reproductive health procedures in policies destined for discrete components of the market defined by their opposition to abortion and proactive birth control).  We would also have to exercise substantial diligence to ensure that participating private insurers manage the premium-based revenues received from our citizens in a manner most conducive to providing universal access high quality basic health care to every resident of the Commonwealth and to providing some threshold of access to more expensive procedures that might be life-saving but otherwise cost prohibitive, acknowledging that our insurers will serve as the preeminent gatekeepers of our systems of health care provision.  In particular, we may mandate that participating insurers be exclusively established as non-profit entities in order to ensure that systemic resources do not leak out as income distributed to shareholders.  We may also consider measures to simplify and standardize administrative procedures in order to reduce the extent to which both private insurers and medical practices are forced to invest in administrative labor time in lieu of investing in expanded access to care.      

The alternative, a tax-financed, single-payer health insurance structure, holds certain advantages and disadvantages.  If the government of the Commonwealth was to monopolize the provision of health insurance to all residents of Massachusetts, then we would instantly confront the broader community of health care providers in Massachusetts as a bearer of insurmountable bargaining power, beyond any extent that could be leveraged by any single, large private insurance pool.  Managed effectively, this degree of bargaining power might have positive effects in mitigating cost expansions for basic health care procedures, but it might have subsequently negative effects on long term investment in health care facilities and technologies across Massachusetts.  In order to counteract such negative effects, the creation of a single payer structure in Massachusetts would have to be accompanied by the creation of broader financial partnerships between the government of the Commonwealth and health care practitioners, especially large scale hospital systems like the Partners Health Care system, to maintain the overall quality of health care access for all Massachusetts residents over time.  We would have to invest public funds into the purchase of medical technologies, the construction of medical facilities, and the development of inventories of pharmaceutical products for our residents, but we could thereby exercise greater control over how our health care systems would evolve over time with changes in available technologies.  Furthermore, by nurturing a partnership with the private research sector in developing health care technologies, we might be capable of leveraging investments in key areas of interest for the public health of the Commonwealth, most notably new generation anti-microbial/antibiotic pharmaceuticals in response to the continuous evolution of infectious microbial species.  We would also, certainly, reduce aggregate administrative expenses within the health care system, as small armies of accountants and billing administrators for the private health insurance industry would be largely eliminated from the Commonwealth.  We might also make space within such a system to allow our citizens to purchase supplemental private insurance to enable them to purchase elective medical services in excess of what our public health system would be willing to authorize for compensation.  

Issues in health care policy remain to be resolved outside of universal health insurance coverage.  Whatever we do to ensure that every resident of the Commonwealth has health insurance coverage from a source other than employer sponsorship, we will need to address particular systemic problems arising specifically from the provision of health care.  First, we will need to engage with the problem of larger provider systems monopolizing local care options and, in the interest of cost control, reducing access to care in particular localities.  In these terms, however we deal with health insurance, we will need to continuously exercise vigilance in assessing the access to basic and, especially, emergency treatment options for every community in Massachusetts.  We cannot have municipalities as large as, say, Brockton or North Adams wholly deprived of emergency care options within their municipal boundaries either because independent hospital facilities were rendered financially insolvent by inadequate compensatory streams or because larger hospital systems could no longer justify the maintenance of financially under-performing facilities in lower income municipalities within their larger portfolios of member hospitals.  Again, the government of the Commonwealth will have to actively partner with private provider systems to ensure that every resident of the Commonwealth has ready access to basic and emergency care in their immediate locality, especially in larger municipalities, regardless of the overall expense in maintaining such facilities.  Alternatively, to the extent that we do become a partner with private provider systems, we will actively intervene in the decision-making of provider systems on particular systemic investments targeted to exploit higher revenue streams through integration of cutting edge technologies at facilities in higher income communities at the expense of enhanced access to basic care in lower income communities.  Emphatically, we will create the necessary mechanisms through which the Massachusetts Department of Public Health will be empowered to exercise a veto over investment decisions by provider systems when they contradict our larger public health strategies and potentially raise aggregate costs for care to every patient across the entire state.  

  

Furthermore, we do need to address the problem of systemic costs arising from medical torts, even insofar as the expenses arising from medical liability may not be as critical a component in rising aggregate medical expenditures as certain conservative voices would like to assert.  There will be consideration on how punitive damages for medical liability might be capped under the condition that providers follow a detailed structure of universal procedural standards for mitigation of medical negligence.  Certainly, any effort to reduce the potential for damages for medical liability will have to be a two-sided endeavor, with providers making palpable changes in the ways that they operate, especially in surgical procedures where small mistakes on the part of surgical teams can lead to fatal outcomes.  We cannot outline the specifics of such efforts to mitigate the costs arising from medical liability, but we are convinced that such efforts will bear abundant benefits for every medical patient in the Commonwealth, both financially and with respect to quality of care that they receive from medical professionals.  

It is clear that we will need to invest public resources in the training of medical professionals and para-professionals.  The practice of medicine is succinctly labor and human capital/skill intensive, and, in the absence of active state support for training, we would be commending a range of medical fields over entirely to the same forces of the market that have driven uncontrolled cost expansions across American medicine for at least a generation.  Rather, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health will be tasked to prepare annual evaluations on human resource needs within Massachusetts hospitals and across health systems to enable the General Court to perform an adequate review of supply and demand for new medical professionals in all facets of health care in the Commonwealth, and we will work with medical schools and training programs for emergency medical technicians, surgical assistants, nursing, and personal care attendants across the Commonwealth to ensure that enrollees in such programs have adequate financial resources to complete their studies and be securely integrated into the health care sector.  We will intentionally shape the growth of health care professionals in diverse fields by delivering grants and low-interest educational loans to medical students.  In return, we will both demand that graduating students remain for some term of practice in Massachusetts and purposefully direct new professionals to health systems most in need of their skills.  In the longer term, we may seek to develop a rapid reaction team for the state in order to coordinate diverse health professionals in response to acute epidemiological and civil defense emergencies, both inside and outside of the Commonwealth.  In certain cases, our doctors, nurses, and para-professionals, acting at the behest of the Commonwealth, may serve as practical ambassadors of our good will toward our countrymen in the other states and toward populations in foreign countries in need of our assistance.  All of these efforts will constitute a single component in a larger mission to assemble and deploy the skills and the labor of every citizen of the Commonwealth, from time to time, to secure our own collective conditions of existence and those of our neediest neighbors in the wider world.  

Finally, we need to consider the residual, though important, components in health insurance and health care provision under the direct management, supervision, or authorization of the federal government.  We have already argued that the federal entitlement programs will be devolved into state management and control, and, in this regard, we will have to consider the place of the Medicare system.  If we construct a tax-financed, single-payer system for Massachusetts, then we will simply fold the existing single-payer components of the Medicare system of retirees into our larger state system.  Similarly, assuming we provide a legal space for supplemental private insurance providers in combination with public single-payer coverage, Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage) plans will realize a comfortable role within our larger insurance schema.  If we move to generalize a mandate based system, then we will continue to manage Medicare Part A under a single-payer oriented benefit methodology and Medicare Part B as a publicly or privately managed basic, premium based insurance program.  In some way, shape, or form, we will accommodate the Medicare system into our broader health insurance system to ensure that our retirees continue to enjoy ready access to high quality health care at minimal personal cost. 

Similarly, either methodology of health insurance reform in the Commonwealth will accommodate the continued functioning of the Medicaid/Mass Health system for lower income populations.  If we pursue a single-payer structure, then we will obviously roll Medicaid/Mass Health into our larger system to include every resident of the Commonwealth into our system regardless of income.  If we adopt a universal mandate for the purchase of private health insurance plans through our Connector, then we will, likewise, roll Medicaid/Mass Health into our broader system and compel current Medicaid/Mass Health recipients to purchase subsidized private insurance, obviously with substantial or total financial support/reimbursement from the Commonwealth.  In either case, we will not countenance the interference of the federal government in our management of our larger health care system, either in the facilitation of marketplaces, selection and provision of private and/or public plans, development of a single-payer, tax-financed structure, oversight and intervention into the investment and managerial decisions of private health care provider systems, or intervention into pricing structures.  There will be no federal role in the provision or maintenance of health care or of public health systems in any state, and we will ensure that no role can emerge by definitively closing any Constitutional avenue by which Congress can intervene in our health care systems.  

COVID-19 and Public Health in Epidemiological Crises

We reside in a world of death and life, and we aspire to forge a world of community, within which we take care not only of our own needs but those of our neighbors.  COVID-19 has not simply been a public health crisis, but it has also been a tragedy of communal existence.  We have been torn asunder from our neighbors and our very families and left in confinement by ourselves.  In the cities, we stare across the empty spaces outside our windows at neighbors with whom we can no longer directly converse.  The quarantines that ravaged our service sector economies were, quite evidently, necessary, but they were inadequate to solve the epidemiological catastrophe that has spread throughout our planet.  We cannot get back to the economics of normality as it existed prior to COVID-19, and the introduction of a vaccine, however swift and effective, will not change this reality.  We would expect that the capacity of an initial vaccine to provide immunity from the corona virus SARS CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 will be partial, at best providing perhaps seventy to eighty percent immunity for individuals exposed to the virus.  With the plethora of vaccine research projects simultaneously in process across the planet, it is likely that the effectiveness of subsequent vaccine projects will continue to improve, but it will not be rapid.  We will all be wearing masks in public for some time to come, we will be socially distanced, and passage across of our borders and diffusion of our people throughout the planet will be strictly controlled, both by us and by other countries.  And our service economies, especially in the cities, will continue to undergo massive and permanent transformations.  Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in the restaurant and hospitality industries have been or will be rendered catastrophically unprofitable by virtue of restrictions and limitations on capacity utilization of real assets in these industries.  A way of life for millions of consumers and a preponderate means of living for millions of workers is in a temporary state of eclipse.  

The outbreak of COVID-19 and our collective response offers numerous lessons for the future.  First, on a global level, the diffusion of COVID-19, from Hubei province in China outward unevenly across the advanced economies and, subsequently, across the developing world, provides us not only with a chronology of the flow of a pathogen transmitted by a particular set of mechanisms but combines our evolving knowledge of transmission mechanisms with our understanding of patterns of social contact in an age of economic globalization.  Pathogens that transfer readily from person to person via respiratory aerosols or via bodily fluids obviously have a history of uneven global transmission in relation to the relative connectivity of infection zones with other spaces.  A pathogen like the virus causing ebola readily transfers person to person through contact with bodily fluids, but recent outbreaks of this disease have demonstrated that certain measures can be taken to isolate such outbreaks.  The same pattern appears to have been the case with earlier corona virus-based respiratory disorders, like SARS and MERS.  The SARS CoV-2 corona virus has simply been far more readily transmissible, and the particular patterns of population flow, from a major Chinese metropolitan region outward to the rest of the planet, have shown that, for purposes of epidemiology, given an ideal degree of viral transmissibility, no corner of the planet is too disconnected to fear contact with a deadly pathogen.  In this sense, any revelation of a new viral pathogen in any corner of the planet has to induce an immediate epidemiological response from public health authorities to determine the particular transmission characteristics of the pathogen and to pattern population flows out of the infection zone to determine how we need to respond.  To the extent that the Chinese government was slow to enable foreign epidemiological experts into Hubei province as initial SARS CoV-2 infections were breaking out, the rest of the world was rendered wholly vulnerable to a swiftly moving viral agent, diffusing from a large, globally connected metropolitan region across Eurasia, to Southern Europe, Iran, India, and, finally, to the Americas.  

Evidently, in Massachusetts, we have the public health and epidemiological resources to respond to outbreaks of new viral pathogens.  We have research facilities to analyze the genetic characteristics and transmission vectors for viral pathogens.  We can readily develop new protocols for isolating and controlling the transmission of viral pathogens.  What we critically need is to develop cadres of rapid response epidemiological researchers, on our behalf and in cooperation with public health authorities throughout the states, to reach out to public health authorities in foreign initial infection zones, both to assist with their initial infection response and to accumulate the necessary data to inform our planning for infection control should transmissions spread to our jurisdictions.  Recognizing that these functions should be performed, at least in part, by such global actors as the World Health Organization (WHO), and while we support their efforts, we also must take whatever opportunities we have to be proactive in our own interests.  Furthermore, on the federal level, the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should have played a critical role in reaching out to their counterparts in China, in coordinating international response plans with WHO to inhibit or, at least, slow down international transmission of the SARS-2 corona virus, and in coordinating with state and local level public health authorities to ensure that our medical communities would be ready for the initial wave of COVID-19 infections.  This, manifestly, did not happen.  We cannot speak to the failures exhibited by WHO, although they certainly are relevant to the larger story of how a deadly respiratory virus was allowed to spread to every corner of the planet between 2019 and 2020.  It should not, however, have been the case that the excellent resources and public credibility of our federal public health agencies would not have been marshaled to effectively come to terms with the spread of the disease.  Our public health authorities in Massachusetts were left to deal with a massive influx of infections on their own.  COVID-19 ravaged the Boston area, filled our hospitals with patients in severe respiratory distress demanding intensive care and intubation, and our elder care facilities, like the Holyoke Soldiers' Home, saw whole wards of significantly vulnerable residents infected en masse, all while the federal government floundered in its incapacity to achieve any meaningful response to the pandemic.  Notwithstanding the evident cost in lives that we endured from the initial wave of COVID-19, it is a testament to the professionalism of our public health authorities and to that of our broader medical community that we largely managed to gain control of transmission and death rates by the summer of 2020, and it is testament to the incapacity of the federal government to serve as anything other an impediment to us that we had to act on our own.       

Looking forward, as we continue to face the prospect of world in the deadly embrace of COVID-19, we will need to sharpen our capacity to address the virus, to control infections, to minimize the ongoing second wave, and to collaborate with public health authorities in the other states so that we can collectively emerge stronger from this dark hour.  We will continue to improve our community efforts at contact tracing, we will continue to wear masks and socially distance, we will continue to respond to the orders of our public health authorities to reduce the size of private gatherings and reduce the capacity of public indoor gathering spaces.  As the second wave progresses, the Commonwealth will augment hospital space and intensive care capacities in localities experiencing significant numbers of infections, especially among non-white populations who have to date suffered disproportionately.  We will look judiciously forward to the emergence of vaccines, and we will develop the methodologies to ensure that they are first distributed to those who need them the most and that they will be administered to adequate quantities of our population in order to ensure that we can arrive at a threshold level of community immunity to return to effectively return to some version of the "normal."  In short, we will continue to learn to live with a virus that we ignore at our collective peril.  

In addition, we, of this party, choose to utilize this moment to emphasize the extent to which the federal government has been absolutely useless in helping us to deal not only with the broader epidemiological circumstances of this crisis but also, critically, with the ongoing economic catastrophe that has accompanied it.  And, someday soon, when COVID-19 no longer ravages our country, we will remember how ineffective and incompetent that federal response was.  As we move forward with our project, it is worth inquiring into the usefulness of a federal public health research and policy development community.  Do we need the CDC and NIH if we can replicate their functions more effectively at the state level and if we can achieve levels of coordination with public health authorities in other states that make a federal public health apparatus wholly redundant?  This is something that desperately needs to be asked even if, at this moment, we lack the ability to formulate a satisfactory answer to our concerns.  We are, however, certain that there will be new pandemics after COVID-19 and, when they emerge, our Commonwealth will be ready with a coherent and professional public health response and a hand to lend to our countrymen in the other states.  

Reproductive Rights and Women's Health in the Commonwealth in a Post-Roe World

In the absence of full reproductive liberty, gender equality as a legal and juridical principle is a dead letter.  If women cannot control their fecundity in their own interests and with regard to their perceived needs, then half of the human species remains a permanent prisoner of biology and anatomical destiny.  Recognizing this to be the case, we unambiguously support certain basic elements of reproductive liberty as prerequisites of gender equality and the full participation of women in the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of human existence.  Reproductive age women must have full access to a range of proactive birth control technologies, including oral contraceptives, intrauterine contraceptive implants, and reversible surgical procedures.  Full reimbursement of the cost for obtaining such birth control technologies must be included in any health insurance policies arising from our larger efforts at health insurance reform, in the same manner that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the federal level had envisioned inclusion of reproductive health technologies in all health insurance policies as a basic contribution to minimum creditable coverage for compliance with the terms of the law before the federal judiciary eviscerated such measures in the name of religious liberty.  Maintenance of full coverage for reproductive health procedures will remain the case whether we continue with a universal mandate-based private insurance system or a single-payer tax-financed system.  Further, women must have full access to emergency contraception (e.g. morning after pill) and to pharmacologically-induced abortion technologies, especially antiprogesterone pharmaceuticals, to terminate unwanted pregnancies at least through the first trimester of fetal development.  Likewise, women should have full access to surgical abortion procedures through the second and third trimesters of fetal development, under the advisement of obstetrical/gynecological professionals, to terminate pregnancies especially for reasons of maternal health and safety.  In this regard, we might support modest restrictions on the availability of late-term abortions, but we acknowledge that such techniques as intact dilation and extraction (IDE) have a place within the procedural tool kits of obstetrical/gynecological professionals and we are not going to profoundly impede health practitioners from performing procedures in the manifest best interests of their patients and in accordance with their patients' free execution of choice.  Finally, we will support full access by men to reproductive technologies, targeted both toward birth control and treatments for sterility, as a constitutive element in developing a thoroughly multi-gendered approach to human reproduction for public health policy in the Commonwealth.  Emphatically, we will approach human reproduction not as a political or sectarian problem, but as a scientific one, grounded in the basic needs of our citizens to enjoy fulfilling human lives through recourse to the available medical technologies at our disposal.  

Conceptualizing further on matters of gender in health care, as a broader concern in maintaining the quality of life for all our citizens, we will seriously consider the investment of health care resources, both public and private, for gender transitioning individuals.  Insofar as surgical gender reassignment and hormonal treatment regimes have become relevant, medically validated procedures for individuals wishing to electively transition between biological genders, we have to discuss the need to include such procedures among the larger range of medical procedures legally mandated for health insurance coverage, either within a tax-financed single-payer structure or within legally mandated policy coverage packages for publicly subsidized marketplace private insurance policies.  Again, if we intend to be serious with regard to the full range of health care needs evident among our citizens, then we cannot ignore the needs of growing numbers of transgender individuals to pursue their lives as they see fit.  We, as a party, will stand compassionately behind the needs of every citizen of the Commonwealth.

As we argue above, our support for the gender-based reproductive health needs of all our citizens will be both a matter of public and private investment of medical resources and a matter of statutory and/or constitutional liberty.  In regard to the latter, we intend to codify our support for the principle that every citizen of the Commonwealth should possess personal autonomy in the maintenance of their reproductive health and the capacity to exercise personal choice in reproductive health decisions subject to the limited and compelling needs of the Commonwealth to protect public health and safety.  Such an affirmation will, under the sovereign democratic self-governance of our citizens, stand in for the federal judicial extension of a right to individual privacy in reproductive health under limitations established and continuously evolving through judicial precedent.  The foundations for these judicial extensions, contained, most clearly, in Roe v. Wade and, secondarily, in Griswold v. Connecticut, were advanced from particular legal theories of substantive due process that searched for particular conceptions of liberty that were supposedly contained within the Constitution of 1787 but that were not otherwise expressed in formal language within the original Constitution or its articles of amendment.  As a matter of Constitutional jurisprudence, we reject these theories and find that their invention of individual rights, abrogating the capacity of sovereign state governments to protect the public health and safety of their citizens in accordance with the determinations of their democratically elected legislatures, has constituted a single but highly important factor in the partisan disintegration of democratic consensus at the federal level.  

For more than a generation, two political factions, in part, transcending party affiliation, have coalesced to wage battle over the availability of abortion as mandated by the Burger Court in the Roe decision.  Our countrymen in other, more conservative states have spent decades chipping away at standards for the minimum legal availability of abortion access, passing laws to mandate parental permission for minors, admitting privileges at hospitals for obstetrical/gynecological professionals, and excessively onerous inspection and licensing rules for women's health clinics engaged, among other things, in the termination of pregnancies.  The net impact of such regulations has not only been the creation of many highly restrictive environments in other states for abortion access but a reduction in access to reproductive health for women writ large.  Moreover, the single-minded focus of conservative partisan groups, determined to invalidate Roe as an element of federal judicial precedent, has shaped the partisan evolution of the federal judiciary, especially over the last two decades.  The refusal of a Republican controlled Senate to even grant a hearing to a Supreme Court appointee of the Obama administration in 2016 to replace a conservative vote on the high court reflects a broader willingness of the Republican Party to jettison the Constitutional responsibilities of Congress, vis-à-vis Presidential selection for members of the federal judiciary, if the execution of those duties might undermine the long term goals of its various constituent organizational supporters to roll back reproductive rights through the courts.  Fidelity or opposition to the terms of Roe has become the quintessential litmus test for nominees to the appellate federal bench, in general, and to the Supreme Court, in particular.  In short, the presence of Roe as a highly contested element of judicial precedent has been critically important to the larger creation of an incommensurable partisan divide across every branch of the federal government, and, hence, it has been a singular underlying motivation, among many, for the articulation of our partisan project.

         

Emphatically, our call for the democratic sovereignty of our Commonwealth and for every state is incompatible with the continued assertion and enforcement by the federal judiciary against the states of any categorical individual rights, either suggested by the expressed language of the Constitution or inferred or otherwise invented by the judiciary as a matter of substantive due process.  Roe, and its assertion of a categorical space for individual privacy in reproductive health decisions under terms defined in a seven to two decision by nine unelected jurists uniquely devoid of any professional expertise in public health, obstetrics, or gynecology, must disappear both as a matter of Constitutional jurisprudence and as one partisan wedge among many splitting the country.  We, in our Commonwealth, will deal with the questions arising from the end of Roe, as will every other state, as it had been before the Burger court informed the state of Texas in 1973 that it was Constitutionally prohibited from impeding full access to abortion procedures in the first trimester of a pregnancy.  We will acknowledge the consequences to women throughout the country of striking the terms of Roe from the corpus of individual liberties enforced by the federal judiciary against the states, and we will, further, acknowledge the attendant consequences for Massachusetts-based opponents of free access to reproductive health procedures from codifying such liberties into the General Laws of our Commonwealth and/or our constitution.  However much we sympathize with the heartfelt convictions of many of our citizens in their respect for the sanctity of human life, especially those involving sincere recourse to religious faith, we are committed to the principle that sexuality, human reproduction, and the integrity of individual choice with respect to the bodies of every individual citizen of our Commonwealth should be accorded a deferential degree of autonomy and liberty from public interference as a matter of law and of public policy.  Nor will we allow any other state government or collection of citizens from outside of our Commonwealth to otherwise threaten or coerce our citizens and our health practitioners in the free practice of female reproductive health, whether performed upon citizens of our Commonwealth or upon citizens of other states who have ventured onto our sovereign soil to obtain necessary health care procedures.  For us, as a party, we understand that the sovereignty of our Commonwealth will be a trade-off, expressed across many dimensions relative to the present political realities of a country poisonously divided along so many partisan battle lines.  We hope that, when we have regained our sovereignty, we will begin to heal these partisan divisions among ourselves and with our countrymen in the other states, but we also acknowledge that, in certain ways, our Constitutional transformations may simply inaugurate new battles or reconstitute the ground across which we refight old ones.     

Opioids, Alcohol, and Depression: Responding to Our American Crises of Despair 

Many of us have been fortunate enough to have found a pathway from secondary education through four year colleges and graduate school into the professions, an income commensurate with our regular expenses with adequate personal budgetary space for a home mortgage payment, a car payment, and retirement savings.  Increasingly, however, more of our neighbors are falling through the cracks in a macroeconomic context in which individuals are consigned to their own fate and to the legacies of marginalization emanating from their families, their upbringing, and a relative inaccessibility of high quality education, from primary through post-secondary levels.  Economics is not the exclusive root of the social disempowerment and  emotional despair for individuals in the contemporary United States, but it is so prevalent as a root cause of the pain of many millions of our countrymen, here in Massachusetts as elsewhere.  Technology is outpacing many less skilled American workers.  As we will argue, moreover, more education is not always the solution to such deficiencies.  Manufacturing, such as it remains in many communities, has increasingly succumbed to automation, where the primary human role has been reduced to computer operations and ancillary machine tending.  If, little more than one generation ago, workers could lay their hands on the objects of their labor as the work of their hands, however supplemented by machines, now the working men and women stand another step removed from the process and the output of mechanized creation.  And the disempowered American worker goes home, not only with less money in his pocket than his parents had a generation earlier, but to a home existence of fragmentation and familial confusion.  Marriage, as a former bedrock institution in the structuration of the American family, is in retreat as the critical prevailing structure in adult cohabitation.  Divorce rates among heterosexual married partners exceed fifty percent of marriages, and homosexual marriages are rapidly realizing a comparable rate of failure.  Parenthood and custodial guidance of minor children increasingly takes on forms that diverge from the nuclear family ideal, often with the predictable effects of stress experienced by parents and inflicted on children.  And, critically, important institutions that structured the lives of many millions of individuals in previous generations, like church, labor unions, softball leagues, and diverse other formal or informal social groupings, have, in our time, disappeared.  To complicate matters further, many of our countrymen find themselves deposited back into such structural anarchies of social life from the structured existence of institutions like the military, from which they emerge with stresses and emotional crises that could never be adequately addressed in their home environments.  The result in many of these circumstances are predictable.  Struggling human beings turn to escapisms, to addictive substances, to alcohol, to drugs, and, sometimes, if they have access to the relevant tools and do not have adequate interpersonal support, they commit suicide.  We are in the midst of a crisis in the personal lives of tens of millions of Americans, compounded by a pandemic and other crises of community.  This complex of crises, in turn, has shaped the partisan divides that we have committed to confront, and, as such, we must come to terms with the mental health and the failure of community supports for individuals in our Commonwealth presently trapped in a cycle of despair and addiction.    

On its face, we understand the present crises of mental health as outcomes of a breakdown of community institutions.  The root causes of these crises will only be successfully addressed by building up new community supports for individuals at risk for deterioration of mental health.  For this reason, our efforts at community organizing, far from a cynical tactic of partisan electioneering, must address the day-to-day needs of the individuals that we will be assembling into new community organizations.  In particular, we need to assess the status of the opioid addiction crises within our municipalities, facilitate access for individuals with recovery programs, and assemble support groups of recovering individuals where they do not already exist.  Our work will not reduce itself to the organization of new twelve-step programs, but neither can we afford to stand back and allow the mental health of our neighbors deteriorate as we pursue pie in the sky projects of Constitutional change that may not bear fruit for several generations.  In an era where the personal is so critically affecting the political, we may need to ask ourselves how we can address the breakdown of the family as a bedrock institution of community.  Insofar as we are committed to secularism and to the separation of church and state, we may still need to inquire into how we can support religious institutions to give suffering individuals the balm of spiritual community and the hope of salvation.  We need to quite specifically consider the problems of manhood and lifelong male psychological development, including the social prevalence of toxic masculinity and misogyny among men in diverse age cohorts and the disconnection and isolation of young men.  And we will need to directly ask how we can address the suffering of the many military veterans in our communities, recovering from battlefield traumatic brain injuries in greater numbers and from other sources of post-traumatic stress disorder.  In these terms, our practice of politics, especially at the level of our municipalities, will not bear any resemblance to the ordered liberal partisanship and the clear boundaries between the political and the personal that the Republicans and the Democrats seem capable of exercising.  

To the extent that we embark on this larger social mission, moreover, we will be accused of practicing or supporting the worst manifestations of totalitarianism, of invading the lives of our neighbors to impose our will and our imageries of family and community, of co-opting religious institutions and other manifestations of community to inculcate a party line, of constructing the mechanisms of a communitarian if not a communist dictatorship of our party.  Such criticisms are inevitable, and we cannot allow them to stop us in our organizing work.  The institutions of liberal government and the effects of the free market on the evolution of our macroeconomies have nurtured the mental health crises against which we are struggling.  They have failed us.  We will not be limited by the terms of liberal governance and of free market institutions to locate the sources of a resolution to the pain of our neighbors.  The social costs of addiction, depression, and broad-based social isolation in our communities have been too high for too long.  

Once we have reached a threshold of political power in the Commonwealth and we have progressed in our broader project of Constitutional change relative to the federal government, we can begin to conceive how more conventional governmental programs might begin to address the problems for which we have otherwise relied on community organizing, but that will be a matter with which we concern ourselves down the road.  We will certainly mandate the inclusion of psychological/psychiatric and addiction recovery services in private health insurance policies offered through our Connector exchange or through single-payer insurance, whatever direction we choose to pursue.  The development of more, locally focused clinical programs of outreach to emotionally impacted individuals may be merited.  In the long term, however, we believe that our efforts at direct community outreach through organizing will yield the biggest returns in terms of minimizing the prevalence of addiction and prevention of interpersonal and self-directed violence, especially suicide.  If we can do no more to render assistance to our neighbors than to make it clear that they are not alone, then it would be a significant measure of success for us to see that the emotional lives of people within our communities had demonstrated a palpable improvement.

Very briefly, we have one last question to address here concerning the licensing and administration of pharmaceutical pain killers and, especially, opiods, critically related to the present health crisis in abuse of opiods.  We are beginning to understand more clearly what transpired over years in the production, licensing, marketing, and prescription of opiod pain killers by pharmaceutical companies, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the broader community of health care providers, and how the prescription of highly addictive pharmaceutical preparations to large numbers of individuals suffering from acute and chronic pain contributed centrally to a crisis of opiod addiction.  To the extent that the scale of opiod addiction in Massachusetts and across the all the states had arisen, in part, because companies like Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed their opiod pain killers to medical practitioners as risk free alternatives for acute pain management, such companies have rightly been found legally liable for the consequences of their own irresponsible engagement with health care providers.  On the other hand, we also have a clear failure of regulatory control by the FDA.  If the FDA had been more proactive in investigating the addictive properties of medications like Purdue's Oxycontin and in dispensing guidance to health care providers regarding the appropriate circumstances for prescription of such medications, especially to minimize dosages under conditions where the prescription of an extended-release opiod pain killer might have been merited, then we might not be dealing with the present social problems of opiod addiction.  In this regard, we have persistent concerns regarding the tripartite revolving doors of regulatory agencies, university research departments, and major pharmaceutical producers.  How can an agency, staffed with personnel exhibiting high levels of professional expertise but simultaneously marred by deep personal and professional connections with the very firms that they are tasked to regulate, be expected to act independently in the public interest?  In the course of our broader efforts to dismantle the present manifestation of the federal regulatory apparatus, we will scrap the FDA and replace it with a state level regulatory authority on pharmaceutical products, among other areas presently within the regulatory umbrella established by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.  In doing so, we must acknowledge that it will constitute an immense challenge for us to maintain the independence of our regulatory agents, acting in the best interests of our citizens, when the same individuals who demonstrate the most knowledge in particular technologies will likely hold intimate connections to the private sector firms that developed those technologies and that they will be tasked to regulate.  This challenge is unavoidable and, its failure in the regulation of prescription opiods notwithstanding, the FDA deserves credit for its long record of professionalism in protecting the American public from unsafe agricultural and pharmaceutical products.  

   

The Injustices and Idiocies of Criminal Justice and the Prison Economy

It is certain that we will continue to need to operate facilities, under the auspices of the state, to detain and isolate individuals who have committed heinous crimes and who we regard as incapable of being released into the general population without risking public safety.  Evidently, there will always be circumstances when we might regard such individuals as having been fully rehabilitated and fit for release, but we must continue to operate with an organizational apparatus and methodologies to assess the rehabilitation of such individuals and to manage the broader process of rehabilitation.  On the other hand, some individuals may never be suitably rehabilitated.  Further, the rehabilitation process for many if not most criminal offenders may be better executed outside of prison settings.  Generally, we need to embark on a serious inquiry into the necessary scale of the Massachusetts prison system, including both state corrections institutions and county jails, and the methodologies by which we determine that particular individuals must be incarcerated in the interest of public safety, where the maintenance of public safety is emphatically our sole overriding concern.  Utilization of the prison system cannot be presumed to serve as a vehicle to exact retribution for the pain inflicted on the victims of crime, violent or otherwise.  In the same sense that the use of capital punishment against a criminal offender cannot bring the victims of a heinous act of murder back to life or provide adequate emotional relief to their loved ones, life sentences can never satisfactorily provide relief or retribution for the actions of criminals and their effects on diverse surviving victims.  We will ensure that the sentencing practices of Massachusetts criminal courts, therefore, embody the utmost prioritization of public safety and thorough assessment of the risks posed in releasing subject offenders back into the general population.  

The proposition that incarceration should manifestly address public safety leads us to a range of other concerns regarding criminal justice.  Most notably, how will we address the problem of illegal narcotics trafficking in Massachusetts?  To the extent that sentencing of individuals in the Massachusetts criminal courts most often involves violation of drug laws or property crimes linked to drug use or trafficking, we will need to develop a standpoint in relation to the enforcement of criminal drug trafficking.  It is, emphatically, untrue that the use of narcotic substances constitutes a victimless crime, insofar as drug use emerges from a stream of activities that quite often involve the use of violence by criminal organizations, and, more minimally, when individual drug users die from overdose or from chemical adulteration of illicit substances, we need to assess the role and criminal culpability of suppliers.  The criminal enforcement of drug laws will not go away, but we do need to determine when threshold levels of culpability have been crossed by individual offenders, necessitating that such individuals be detained and isolated within the prison system for prolonged periods.  On the contrary, we need alternative mechanisms of surveillance and control over lesser offenders.  If our efforts at criminal justice reform result in the release of hundreds of corrections officers from the payrolls of our prisons, then they will almost certainly result in a buildup of thousands of additional professionals as managers in our parole system and the solicitation of assistance from a volunteer army of community organizers to keep criminal drug offenders permanently under watch.  It may well be that certain individuals assigned to parole for drug offenses find themselves in the tight embrace of the Commonwealth for years, with the microscope of the state perpetually held over their day-to-day activities.  If we succeed in such endeavors, then perhaps we will curb the growth of death rates from, among other things, the abuse of illicitly obtained fentanyl and other opiods.  We will also, certainly, entertain the idea of mandatory drug treatment, when it seems efficacious to the long term recovery of certain drug abusers, and job placement programs, to enable drug abusers and small scale traffickers to build a newly structured existence beyond drugs.  Like so many other areas of our broader program of societal transformation for the Commonwealth, the success of our efforts in dealing with the illicit drug trade in Massachusetts will turn on the axis of community organization.  We will only succeed if we transform our citizens into the executors of a broader vision of community, that we are all engaged in a crusade together to build a new Commonwealth, minimally evident in our struggles to resuscitate our neighbors from their battles with depression, despair, and addiction.

We will eliminate any residual mandatory minimum criminal sentences from our General Laws and leave our criminal courts maximum discretion with respect to the appropriateness of sentencing.  We will not fill our county lockups or our state correctional institutions with either first time non-violent offenders or return offenders for petty theft or violations of the drug laws.  Rather, we will concentrate our attention on criminal organizations oriented to the high level trafficking of narcotics and/or weapons, against whom we will adequately equip and arm our law enforcement agencies and develop well organized strategies of interdiction.  And we will, of course, devote attention to isolated violent offenders, particularly with regard to domestic/familial/conjugal aggression.  Nonetheless, we are convinced that an adequate leeway for state jurists in the criminal courts is the best policy to follow with respect to sentencing guidelines and alternative conditionalities, including the issuance of short term restraining orders and permanent injunctions.  We cannot tie the hands of judges with excessive requirements for incarceration.  On the other hand, if judges release criminal offenders with sentences that do not impose confinement within the prison system, we certainly must have the community resources in place to ensure that correction of transgressive behavior and rehabilitation can be expected to occur within an unconfined setting.

We have one additional consideration to entertain with regard to our prison system and, emphatically, how we mean to separate ourselves from our countrymen in numerous other states.  We have no intention to use our prison system as a cash cow to fill state or local government coffers or as a vehicle for social control of targeted populations through forced labor, authorized under the terms of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of 1787.  It should be viewed as a shameful legacy of American race relations that, in the immediate aftermath of post-Civil War Reconstruction, the southern states lost no time to take advantage of the critical prison loophole of the Thirteenth Amendment to return African-Americans to a state of involuntary servitude on state managed prison plantations and, subsequently, in chain-gang public works projects.  Even in our times, numerous state prison systems have utilized their incarcerated populations as an inexpensive, captive labor force to be hired out to private, market oriented production projects, offsetting the costs of maintaining such prison systems and providing private firms with labor pools at a privileged, subsidized cost advantage relative to free labor.  Prison commodity production not only competes against alternative free market sources of labor, but it also incentivizes excessively harsh sentencing guidelines for criminal offenders because every fresh body can earn returns for the state.  It substitutes an economic argument in favor of the accumulation of prison populations against an argument grounded in an explicit concern for public safety.  In this respect, we are committed to the proposition that we should never give in to the appeal of converting our prisons into revenue sources for the Commonwealth.  Nor should our jurisdictional authorities be reliant on assessment of fines and fees against parties in the custody of our correctional system or our parole system.  We will fully fund our corrections and parole systems from tax revenues, and we will limit the size and number of our state correctional institutions, their inhabitants will be confined in their walls because we seriously question the ability of these individuals to reside as free citizens in the general population in view of their past pathological behavior, and we will continue to incarcerate them only to the extent that they remain, in the judgment of our criminal justice professionals, a threat to others.

    

Access to High Quality Basic Education and a Diversity of Post-Secondary Options

It has become commonplace to view the formal educational process, from primary to secondary through post-secondary and post-graduate studies, as a privileged vehicle of individual economic mobility.  In these terms, the primary purpose of education is to enable individuals to accumulate adequate professional qualifications for employment opportunities of their choice.  In essence, schools constitute factories for the manufacture of new workers to staff an evolving macroeconomy.  While we are sympathetic with certain aspects of this perspective and we certainly acknowledge the necessity of maintaining a highly skilled labor force in the Commonwealth, we find this view reductive in numerous important and problematic ways.  If we were to assume that schools exclusively or even primarily served the needs of worker training, then it would behoove us to restructure the pathways through which individual students advance over their maturation in order to maximize the social return to training particular individuals in particular, socially prioritized professions and to steer the progressive development of our macroeconomy over time and in response to transformations in technology and in global commerce.  Students would be reducible to products against which we, as economic policy makers, should exercise rigorous production control to ensure that the right students were placed in the right production lines, to derive the right end products, and to shape the right macroeconomic structure for the future of Massachusetts.  

For our part, such an imagery of an educational system appears wholly inconsistent with our commitment to create a Commonwealth of free and, individually and collectively, empowered democratic citizens.  Our students, from pre-k through post-doctoral studies, are not objective and manipulable outputs in a worker factory, and, in any case, our management of economic variables, like the educational endowments of our collective labor force, cannot privilege a singular, growth oriented logic of capital investment overriding every other concern regarding the quality of life of our citizens.  Neither, in this respect, would we count ourselves as the rationalistic puppet masters of a cradle to grave socialist economic experiment in maximizing the collective material well being of our citizens, subject to our capacity to continuously generate a cutting edge labor force.  Not only is that too much weight to place on our shoulders as policy makers, but it profoundly contradicts everything American history has taught us about the economics of free markets and the virtues of vigorous entrepreneurial freedom.  Whatever we do with public education in Massachusetts, we must remain committed to the principle that we are educating human beings to be free and responsible agents in a society structured by free markets, by public secularism, by moral, spiritual, cultural, and political liberty, and by collective democratic self-governance under the further principle that the state is the union of all citizens.  We cannot train workers to be productive workers without training citizens to be knowledgeable and committed citizens and, further, without training neighbors to be attentive and generous community members and without training future parents to be caring, compassionate, and engaged parents.  

At the outset of our broader partisan project, we do not have a universal formula for how to reform public education in Massachusetts or even if the term reform precisely captures what we seek to accomplish in approaching public education.  Too many experiments in educational reform have been, to date, attempted, in the interest of enforcing rigorous curricular standards on public primary and secondary education, and these reforms have tended to ossify the development of pedagogical methodologies in order to focus students on passing standardized tests, with systemic funding and local control over school districts hinging on the outcomes of such tests.  We acknowledge the well meaning rationalizations that fueled this transformation of primary and secondary educational standards in the Commonwealth, culminating in the Education Reform Act of 1993.  Nonetheless, we think that the reforms that established the MCAS testing system and that, consequently, overhauled pedagogical methods across public primary and secondary education in Massachusetts were a mistake.  We cannot reduce the performance of local school districts to a number or to a set of numbers, and we certainly cannot continue to bring local school districts, mostly in ethnically and racially diverse low income municipalities, into formal receivership through the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education simply because their numbers missed a threshold.  Rather, on the state level, we not only have a responsibility to ensure that local school districts are adequately serving their students with high quality basic education, measurable in terms of certain threshold standards however we choose to quantify them, but we also have a responsibility to ensure that such districts remain under perpetual local democratic accountability and receive substantial support from their communities, not merely in public, property tax-based financing but also in the organization of local, volunteer actors to aggressively participate in the education and the mentoring of students.  If we are to succeed in equalizing public educational outcomes across public primary and secondary educational districts in the Commonwealth, then it will be because we succeeded in particular forms of community organizing explicitly oriented toward the support of public education, providing students with an abundance of adult educational and mentoring resources to correct for a wide range of social deficiencies impeding their full capacity to enrich themselves with the knowledge imparted by their teachers and by other mentors, of course, including their parents.  As in so many other areas that we have so far identified, community organizing will be critical to everything that we might imagine ourselves achieving in public education at the primary and secondary levels.  

In terms of curricula and pedagogy, there are a great many ideas that we might want to advance as necessary components to a larger transformation of public primary and secondary education.  More generally, we recognize that individual students respond to a range of divergent pedagogical approaches to imparting knowledge.  Some students respond better to in-person instruction methods in small classes that maximize interactions between students and teachers, while others are comfortable with methods that minimize the direct role of the instructor in favor of self-directed accumulation of information by the student.  It would be difficult to craft statutory standards or even subsequent administrative regulations in order to open the door to as many different pedagogical approaches as we might find efficacious to the public educational process in order to reach every student left behind by conventional methods.  For this reason, we may advocate a continuous recourse to public charter schools, embodying a multiplicity of diverse pedagogical methodologies, as an alternative for students that are not adequately served by conventional public education, provided such institutions can tangibly argue that they have succeeded in particular areas where conventional district schools have failed.  On the other hand, we recognize the problems potentially created when charter schools simply siphon off the most talented and gifted of students from local districts, impacting, in turn, the cumulative academic performance of local districts, and we also recognize that charter schools can develop niche academic environments that may disproportionately address particular curricular goals to the detriment of others.  We certainly value, in this respect, the prioritization of social justice in the curricular and pedagogical focus of certain public charter schools, but social justice learning cannot displace thorough instruction of basic, universal curricular material, including, certainly, reading/writing, math, and science.  Evidently, there will remain a role to be played by public charter schools to the extent that they remain legitimately innovative in their approaches to public primary and secondary education, but we do need to approach every diversion of students away from conventional public education with some degree of scrutiny.  

With regard to curriculum, we obviously should prioritize the acquisition of basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics, a basic proficiency in the sciences, and a basic understanding of civics, including knowledge of American history and government, as cumulative academic goals for all students emerging from public primary and secondary education.  On the other hand, where do art, music, and other subjects oriented toward stimulating, nurturing, and defining human creativity fit within our broader model at each grade level in primary and secondary education?  What choices should be made, at each subsequent level, on introduction of students to both the Western canon of literature and to non-Western sources, and what methodologies should inform local district policy makers, from superintendents down to individual teachers, on how to make such decisions?  In instruction of American history, how can we meaningfully and purposefully integrate accounts on indigenous cultures, both as they existed in pre-Columbian America and as they presently exist, and on the broader history of African-Americans, including critical considerations of slavery and the slave trade, the lingering legacies of Jim Crow, and of post-Great Migration disempowerment and marginalization of African-Americans in the Northern states, such that we do not advance a curriculum biased toward particular Eurocentric imageries of American cultural, economic, and political development?  How soon should we introduce students to foreign language instruction and, more generally, how do we deepen the sensitivity and curiosity of our students to other cultures, especially non-Western ones?  At what stage of the education process is it fair to begin introducing students with a substantial aptitude for mathematics and the sciences to epistemology, in order to ensure that we are inculcating students with the ability to think critically about the knowledge with which we are imparting them?  How soon can we begin to entertain elementary discussions about ethics with younger minds, in the interest of crafting thought processes that can embody a diversity of interpersonal concerns about day-to-day existence in addition to the needs of the self?  At the secondary level, how and when will we begin to introduce mechanical problems and basic vocational and everyday life skills, important both to potential college-bound students and to students who may enter the workforce immediately after high school graduation?  What standards should we apply in evaluating our secondary level vocational training programs?  In particular, what are our expectations regarding the capacities of vocational students to enter into adequately remunerative employment upon graduation, assuming we are framing such questions around detailed knowledge of local labor markets, the demand for particular skill sets, and the availability of alternative, legitimate non-labor sources of income?  These are all important questions that we will have to entertain politically as we move forward toward a new sovereign democratic vision of our Commonwealth in which we will be capable of exercising substantial discretion with regard to how we impart our knowledge on subsequent generations to enable our Commonwealth to evolve and thrive well into the future.  Whatever we do with alternative pedagogical and curricular approaches to primary and secondary education, we need to recognize that we will be impacting the long term performance of students and, thus, their capacities to obtain a high quality basic education that will meet their lifetime needs and that will, simultaneously, shape their understanding of their rights and responsibilities as citizens of this Commonwealth. 

On the matter of reading and writing, as foundational skills to be introduced at the first stages of the education process, we clearly need to weigh in on the debate over methodologies for the introduction of reading skills to our youngest students in Massachusetts.  Recently, cognitive science has offered the suggestion that development of the human capacity to interpret and internalize the meaning of written words follows a unique and singular logic in the brain, that this logic is intensively driven by phonic interpretation and comprehension (i.e. sounding through words and memorization of the concepts connected to such words), and that methodologies driven intensively by a thematic relational logic between words and concepts to the exclusion of phonic instruction yield manifestly inferior results in the instruction of basic reading skills, at least with regard to the English language.  As we have suggested above, we are dubious of any one-size-fits-all formulas in pedagogy.  Nonetheless, we have to concede, on some level, that the emphasis on phonic-driven interpretation in the unique context of English language reading instruction or, more generally, in the instruction of reading in languages formally codified through alphabets appears largely well placed and, at least in some degree, validated by cognitive research.  More importantly, we seek to express our commitment to the principle that every student in the Commonwealth should be conferred the resources necessary to develop a range of cognitive skills necessary both for further learning and for broader lifelong social existence.  Emphatically, there will be a place for phonics in the instruction of reading for all younger students in Massachusetts, whether or not phonic instruction is prioritized over other pedagogical methodologies in individual contexts.  It behooves us to remember that every student learns differently and that the overriding purpose in educational policy and reform is not to discover a singular one-size-fits-all pedagogical method that will maximize returns to educational funding, notwithstanding every instance in which individual students are left behind, but to articulate a commitment to find the means within our communities to reach every student, regardless of the cost.  We will not treat English language reading instruction in Massachusetts primarily as funding optimization problem searching for a single best solution.  

With regard to the financing of public primary and secondary education, we recognize the problems inherent in reliance on property tax revenues for local districts, particularly involving the limitations imposed by Proposition Two and A Half.  Again, we have to emphasize that, at least as we begin our broader project, we may simply have to learn how to do more with less in all of our municipalities, and this will require broad recourse to community building and community investment in the outcomes of public education, with or without enhanced tax revenues from either the local or the state level.  Among our critical concerns, however, must be the problem of financial disproportionalities in property tax revenue sources and in Chapter 70 state educational funding between districts.  There are, evidently, adjustments that we can and should make to funding formulae to reduce, in particular, disproportionalities between districts caused largely by differences in property tax revenues.  On the other hand, such changes need to be considered in a broader framework that comprehends the extent to which local students take advantage of public charter schools and school choice to exit particular school districts.  More generally, with regard to the problem of financing, we need to discuss the extent to which public charter schools and the school choice program continue to serve the broader objectives of public primary and secondary educational reform in Massachusetts.  If, in the end, our objective is to ensure that no student, in any public school district, should ever face a scenario in which it is impossible for them to obtain a high quality public education within their home public school district, then, pedagogical concerns notwithstanding, why should we authorize the existence of public charter schools and school choice optioning out of local districts?  

Moreover, to the extent that we remain concerned about the demographic diversity of local school districts as a broader component in a strategy to ameliorate, among other things, performance disparities between majority white and majority non-white districts, can we continue to authorize educational policies that, in effect, promote segregation and the continued stagnation of performance in low income and/or heavily non-white districts?  School choice policies and the presence of public charter schools can have the inadvertent effect of making certain local district schools less diverse and more homogeneous with respect the racial composition of a municipality.  We understand that the presence of racial and income disparities across local districts palpably impact not only the aggregate educational performance of students but also the economic well-being of wider municipalities.  When households make residential location decisions based on the demographic composition of local school districts, albeit without explicit and intentionally racist motivations, patterns of de facto educational segregation get reinforced, to the detriment of every effort to uplift struggling communities.  We do not want to create more avenues to enable, in particular, white students to opt out of educational environments in which they will be the racial minority of their student body.  Finally, to the extent that we seek remediation of financial disparities between local school districts, how do we address such issues across local jurisdictional boundaries without raising governance concerns?  Consolidation of municipalities into regional districts has constituted an important mechanism in controlling costs faced by individual municipalities, especially for smaller, rural towns, but the operation of such districts tends to be clunky, insofar as multiple towns must arrive at a budgetary consensus on investments in human resources and infrastructure.  If, on the contrary, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education decided to forcibly consolidate budgeting between municipalities to ameliorate funding disparities between majority white and majority non-white municipalities, then, minimally, we would be potentially undermining democratic control of local schools at the level of each municipality.  This might be more than the democratic process at the municipal level could bear, especially for districts that enjoy substantial local advantages in funding that they do not want to surrender under any circumstance.  There is a lot for us to consider in regard to educational finance at the primary and secondary levels, and there are few easy answers that will immediately enjoy universal appeal among local educational policy makers, administrators, educators, parents, and, most critically, tax-payers.     

Likewise, consideration of financing and the role of charter schools as alternatives to district schools raises questions regarding the role of organized labor in public education.  Too much of the argument in favor of alternatives to conventional district public education have turned on the absence of organized labor and, hence, have conveyed the notion that unions of public educators are, in some way, detrimental to the improvement of public education.  Emphatically, we support unions, generally, and unions of public educators, in particular.  A large part of the current financial ills of local district schools concerns contractual increases in labor costs, most critically for health insurance.  No resolution of this problem will be realized until we separate health insurance from the conditions of employment across our entire economy.  In this regard, we are confident that a broader health insurance reform, either universal mandate-based or single-payer, would have mitigating effects on the growth of public education budgets for local districts, changes in union contracts notwithstanding.  Beyond the problem of health insurance, it is worth considering how cooperation with teacher unions can facilitate rather than impede the pursuit of improvements in the quality of education in local districts.  If the availability of public charter schools introduces the possibility of pedagogical experimentation, there remains no reason why such pedagogical entrepreneurship cannot happen in district schools through unionized instructors.  Moreover, there is no reason why we cannot develop public charter schools expressly managed and administered by unionized public educators.  More broadly, we do not want to find ourselves, as policy makers at either the district or the state level, facing a false dichotomy between cooperation with unionized public educators and the enactment of successful, flexible alternative pedagogical approaches in primary and secondary education.  We need to maximize the opportunities for teachers to be creative and entrepreneurial in how they approach their work and how they interact with their students.  And, again, the success or failure of public educators will, to a significant extent, turn on the availability of community resources and volunteer help, and we, as a party, need to make the success of local public education a key goal in our organizing work.  It is, in this sense, imperative that we stop blaming unionized teachers or seeking to find fault in contractual tenure provisions as the principal cause of stagnation in local district school academic performance.  Rather, our communities need to take ownership on a wider level for the performance of our primary and secondary schools, including the implicit social costs of allowing either educational infrastructure or human resources to deteriorate in local public school districts in order to keep property tax rates at unsustainably low levels.    

As a final consideration on primary and secondary education, we can acknowledge that a space of freedom should continue to exist for families that choose to home-school their children.  On the other hand, we are determined that all students that emerge from home-schooling should possess the same endowments of formal education that their counterparts in local district public schools do at the moment they exit home schooling.  Moreover, we have concerns about the competency of home schooling educators and their capacity to convey the broader curricular standards that we consider essential for satisfaction of our public educational goals.  In this regard, we will insist that all parents who wish to home school their children be compelled to undertake annual training on curricular standards, to be sponsored and administered by local districts, in order to ensure that such educators are fully cognizant of our expectations regarding their actions.  Pedagogically, we are confident that, in most cases, home-schooling parents are more readily capable of gauging the pace and optimal structure of learning for their children.  We will, further, insist that local districts perform periodic testing of home-schooled students to determine whether they are keeping pace with formally schooled students.  Finally, we will do what we can, especially, through the intervention of local community organizations involved in education, to ensure that home-schooling parents have opportunities to participate in group learning and other environments that can supplement strict reliance on parent-child educational processes and facilitate engagement of student with others outside of their home environments.  

Assuming we create public primary and secondary educational systems that achieve the goal of creating adult citizens who are literate, capable of undertaking basic mathematical operations to solve everyday problems, capable of mastering a range of everyday life skills, capable of making decisions regarding their everyday lives and the political direction of their communities, and thoroughly engaged in creating and sustaining responsible moral communities by acting collectively with their neighbors, then we are still left with abundant questions about what post-secondary education should look like for most individuals and what investments we should make, both as a party and through the state government we intend to lead, in the structure of post-secondary education in our Commonwealth.  If we assume, in turn, that post-secondary education should be a universal destiny for every resident of Massachusetts, then we should also concede the point that not everyone will find their way into a four-year liberal arts degree program, medical school, law school, an MBA program, or a PhD program leading into academia or the higher ranks of a profession.  Again, not to interject any impression that we could ever act as omniscient planners in the evolution of the Massachusetts labor force or that the sole rationale of investments in post-secondary education involve individual economic mobility, the macroeconomy of the Commonwealth will always need more plumbers, electricians, carpenters, general construction tradesmen, pipe-fitters, draftsmen, land surveyors, meat cutters, line cooks, pastry chefs, nurses' assistants, personal care attendants, dental hygienists, computer hardware technicians, and many, many other skilled professional or trades positions not strictly requiring a four year degree for validation of competence or qualification.  We will utilize the community college system to provide publicly-financed avenues for training in such fields, culminating in professional certification, and, where possible, we will invite professional organizations, trade unions, and designated employers to directly participate in professional training in exchange for preferential placement/hiring for graduates.  Moreover, we will train some portion of young adults in the Commonwealth in skilled fields associated with the National Guard system as we undertake privileged defense planning for the Commonwealth in coordination with federal military authorities.  To the extent that individuals brought into the National Guard system emerge from their service with an accumulation of potentially marketable skills, we will help them if they seek to convert such training into remunerative private employment by means of job placement networking.  

With regard to four-year degree programs and liberal arts education in the University of Massachusetts system and the system of state universities, we recognize that some portion of the population of the Commonwealth will be better served in emerging from secondary education and continuing directly into a four-year degree program.  Our public universities operate to serve the needs of our citizens to seek a higher education for themselves and for their children that will both respond to their levels of academic attainment upon graduation from secondary school and to the particular needs and desires that prompted them to pursue higher learning in the first place while simultaneously offering a cost effective choice relative to private institutions of higher learning.  In contrast to our community college system, which may operate, to some extent, as a counterpart and a feeder to the state universities and the University of Massachusetts system, the public universities cannot be envisioned as institutions driven by a privileged mission of occupational training.  Such a perspective devalues the larger ethos of liberal arts education as a gateway to a deepening understanding of the human condition, of philosophy, of literature, of cultural studies, of the social sciences, and of the natural and physical sciences, including mathematics and engineering.  If, in a certain sense, liberal arts education seeks to establish itself as a privileged environment to ask and to offer answers to timeless questions about the world and about humanity, then it remains a necessary component in the broader structure of education in Massachusetts if we seek, as a matter of public policy, to cultivate the types of practical professionals and abstract thinkers that can drive our Commonwealth and its macroeconomy toward the future.  In this regard, notwithstanding the excellent private institutions of higher learning present within our Commonwealth, we have an obligation to continue to financially support and to examine opportunities to expand our public university systems, not only to ensure that our own citizens have first-rate and affordable opportunities to undertake learning in the liberal arts but to offer students from outside of our Commonwealth the chance to benefit from our investments, if at a modest financial premium.  

Furthermore, we need to reframe our larger vision of the public university systems and their place within a Commonwealth where we would expect every citizen to take on a more engaged role in community and in the operations of government.  If we expect our citizens to do more as public actors, then we will need them to embody a higher base level of education.  In these terms, we will need public institutions of liberal arts education as much for students emerging immediately from secondary schooling as we will for students in middle age, returning to school to undertake course work that will deepen their understanding of subjects not immediately pertinent to their past occupational experiences.  Non-traditional students will become a larger component in the reality of public higher education in Massachusetts, not only for the community colleges but also for the public universities.  And, again, our efforts at community organizing may stand to aid such a transformation of the age profile of liberal arts education in the Commonwealth to the extent that we make conscious efforts to nurture diverse forms of informal popular education in our communities.  Minimally, our efforts to educate the electorate of the Commonwealth in policy issues may stimulate the interest of a broader segment of our citizens in economic issues and, as such, stimulate education in such areas of research.  

We should, in advancing our intentions for liberal arts education in the state universities and the University of Massachusetts systems, briefly convey our perspective on the free transmission of ideas and, in particular, conceptions that might be deemed socially incendiary or otherwise politically divisive.  Emphatically, we are descendants of the liberal Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment stood as the ideological foundation of our revolution and it informed the Founders when they framed the Constitution of 1787.  In this respect, we can do no better than to proceed as our Founders did and ensure, as best we can, that the institutions we foster in political culture and in academia constitute a free and open marketplace for diverse ideas, where the best, most persuasive ideas command acceptance from the largest audience.  Still, there are certain ideas that certain segments of our population would deem so vile and so incendiary that, it is argued, we should deny proponents of these ideas a free space to propagate them and to be heard.  If we envision ourselves as defenders of free speech, then we have to come to terms with a response to those who would seek to censor politically objectionable ideas, especially the sorts of ideas that we find at the roots of our broader partisan malaise with our conservative and reactionary countrymen, both at home in Massachusetts and in the other states.  

Any exercise of free speech implicates the structuring issues of means/media, context, and content.  By what means/media are ideas being transmitted?  What are the potential dimensions of the audience that can be reached through a particular medium?  How might the financial and social capital resources of the proponents/speakers affect their choice of media and, hence, their ability to reach a larger audience?  How does the particular temporal and spatial context in which a particular idea is being transmitted shape its effect on its audience, making it especially effective and its impact especially odious?  Is the content of certain ideas, expressed in certain contexts via particular, especially expansive media, so pernicious that we should enjoy a right to forcibly prevent the exercise of such speech and intentionally censor its proponents?  There are numerous considerations that we need to unpack here, but we would definitively argue that it is impossible for us to advance with any categorical propositions with regard to free speech.  On the other hand, there are certain points that we can definitively make regarding speech in our public higher educational institutions.  First, we cannot allow private parties to act as default censors of free speech by other private parties where both are not otherwise constrained by the particular contexts in which they are acting.  That is to say, we cannot allow groups of students to forcibly silence other students, faculty members, or individuals from outside of the public higher educational community for expressing ideas that they deem offensive.  Doing so would constitute an abdication of any respect for free speech in the face of mob rule.  Second, we recognize that it should remain within the purview of our university administrators to regulate the means by which particular private parties can utilize the spaces of our higher educational institutions to exercise free speech and to determine when the ideas expressed by particular groups at particular times and places may be sufficiently inflammatory and dangerous to public order and to the mission of the university, as a site for the free transmission of ideas, that they should be restrained.  Conversely, we acknowledge that differences exist between the expression of controversial ideas in academia and incitements to violent action in partisan gatherings, that these differences are structured by means of expression and by context, and that higher educational institutions have an obligation to ensure that they remain open spaces for the expression of controversial ideas even to the extent that the expression of such ideas generates a visceral reaction from those who hear them.  Emphatically, we cannot stop people from feeling offended by ideas that circulate within our public institutions of higher learning.  The appropriate reaction to such ideas is to organize in order to argue more persuasively against them by the best means available, not to throw bricks, assault police officers or university officials, or destroy state property.  In the end, we hope that a vibrant environment of liberal arts education in our state universities and the University of Massachusetts system will nurture robust debate on controversial ideas and that such debate will contribute to the vibrancy of our larger culture of political democracy in the Commonwealth.

    

With respect to financing, everything we seek to achieve for public higher education in the Commonwealth has been and will remain costly.  Again, we have some of the same concerns for higher education evident with public primary and secondary education, especially with respect to labor costs and financing of health insurance and ancillary benefits.  Educators in higher education carry substantial curricula vitae of academic credentials, all of which both require and command a substantial financial investment on the part of applicants and employers, respectively.  Practical management of institutions of higher learning requires strategizing, development of niche specializations, and the development and maintenance of a particular public persona, favorable to attracting students from particular demographics to particular academic programs.  Differentiating between target demographics in attracting students is extremely relevant to the extent that different groups may be more capable of bearing the full financial burden of tuition and fees, while others may require more substantial financial assistance.  Similarly, some students, especially in particular disciplinary fields, will be more likely to be able to contribute to endowments subsequently, in the interest of further expanding financial options for future students.  

If we are seeking to create public higher educational systems that are, more or less, insulated from these particular concerns, at least for citizens of the Commonwealth, then we will bear a significant public burden in investments for each component of our public higher educational system, especially to ensure that the doors of opportunity remain open for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Manifestly, we must safeguard the diversity of our student bodies in all performance tiers of our higher educational systems if only because our failure to devote sufficient attention to particular disadvantaged demographics within and outside of our population risks the possibility that we are foregoing particular pools of superbly talented students.  Many voices across the span of progressive political opinion in the United States have advanced the argument that public higher education should be made free of charge to every citizen.  While there is something to be said for this argument, we remain skeptical that we will be able to achieve such a goal for Massachusetts.  Rather, it is certain that we must do more to ensure that every individual, at every age, demonstrating substantial talent and aptitude for particular fields of intellectual study in the liberal arts will be able to attend a public institution of higher learning whether or not they can afford it with their own available financial resources.  And, further, to the extent that we anticipate a substantial role for the community colleges in vocational training, we will make admission to community colleges financially realistic for every citizen of the Commonwealth.  There is simply too much to consider here to formulate a clear, concrete policy on financing of public higher education for the Commonwealth.  However, it suffices to say that public higher education will remain an important component in the larger community of post-secondary education in Massachusetts and we will consider how we can best manage our higher educational systems for the greatest benefit for our citizens.   

Families and Support for Parents: Shoring the Cornerstones of Community

Families have always been the cornerstones of human community.  However they have been constituted or otherwise defined, families and the stability of the family as an institution has been critical to progressive human development and to the broader stability of wider social formations, including the nation, conceivable as the wider family of all countrymen.  We have watched the family in Western culture evolving over time, changing simultaneously in a many positive and negative directions.  In conjunction with the elevated cultural and economic status of women, the family has assumed a subtly more egalitarian character.  On the other hand, as a great many astute feminist thinkers have observed, the traditional familial burdens of women have not significantly abated or been redistributed in durable ways between the sexes among heterosexual couples.  Same-sex oriented families are becoming far more common and significantly gaining acceptance from larger proportions of the populations of Western societies, on both a cultural and a political/legal level.  Even to the extent that acceptance of same-sex unions lags within numerous Western religious traditions, the cultural progress of wider populations, especially among younger age cohorts, has encouraged, minimally, a bifurcation of sectarian ideals from deeper concerns regarding the freedom of individuals in a liberal, constitutionally sanctioned political order.  In these terms, the family, as we know it in the West, is rapidly and fundamentally in a state of flux, subject to the inclusion of entirely new manifestations of familial union.  

Conversely, to the extent that the institution of marital union has constituted the legal sanctification of the family, we harbor legitimate concerns that the health of the family in the West is in danger.  Over fifty percent of heterosexual unions now end in legal divorce, and same-sex unions are increasingly reaching comparable levels of dissolution.  The degree to which marital unions are ending in divorce, in turn, raises concerns regarding the parental care of minor children.  Beyond the matter of parenting, we are concerned about the mental/emotional health of adults partners, confronted with the breakdown of unions that were intended to structure large dimensions of their personal lives.  Insofar as we both accept and actively support many of the changes in individual freedom that our contemporary stage of Western cultural and political development have brought, we acknowledge that many of these changes have shaped the breakdown of the family as a key institution of community.  In addition, we need to consider the impact of changes in economic processes, especially gendered patterns of employment and labor compensation, that have promoted the breakdown of the family over time.  In these terms, we, as a party, seek to develop a definitive politics of the family that will, on the one hand, transcend the limitations imposed on us by traditional liberal thought and political practice and, on the other hand, forego any conservative impulse to jettison all of the gains made by women, by same-sex couples, and for children in the interest of restoring some antiquated vision of the patriarchal ideal.  We need to work to shore up the family while simultaneously recognizing that what we mean by the family is changing and will continue to change well into the future.

Our initial efforts at community organizing will seek to address a range of derivative familial issues, including the mental/emotional health of individuals, substance abuse, and the lingering need of families to obtain adequate and affordable child care.  As we have argued, we will intentionally organize support groups around diverse issues, but we will also organize child care cooperatives and parental support/mentoring initiatives especially for younger couples and for single parents.  Acknowledging that such supports already exist and may be readily utilized by families in need, it is evident that at least some families are falling through the cracks and that available resources can always stand to be augmented by larger numbers of committed and engaged organizers.  Moreover, it is also evident that particular, discrete racially and ethnically defined segments of the population of the Commonwealth have not been adequately served, especially, by public familial support agencies, the best efforts of committed and well trained public social workers notwithstanding.  We need to leverage our most entrepreneurial instincts in order to find new ways to integrate every household into the web of community and, thus, to ensure that every family enjoys supports in times of need.  Conversely, our efforts must simultaneously respect the freedom of individuals and their capacity to opt in or out, in the same sense that the integrity of every family is subject to the will of its constitutive individuals.  We emphatically acknowledge that no individual should ever be compelled to endure an existence in a familial environment in which they experience either the threat or the perennial reality of violence, either emotional or physical.  Women and children, especially, need adequate community support to vacate contexts of domestic violence and to restore or create the potential for stable household existence and positive personal development.  In the end, our efforts in community organizing in support of the viability of stable and nurturing families will succeed or fail in proportion to our capacity to argue persuasively to those for whom we would address our appeals.  The same will certainly be true of our subsequent efforts in electoral politics.    

When we have achieved a threshold of political power in the government of the Commonwealth and at the federal level that will afford us the ability to proceed with executable public policy, we will seek to maintain or to create a range of income supports for households, in particular, to ensure that no child in the Commonwealth should ever be compelled to endure poverty.  Below, we will outline our ideas on the subject of universal basic income as an institution to address the progressive transformation of labor markets over time.  On the assumption that a universal basic income, derived from the income tax system of the Commonwealth, will be part and parcel of our broader program of income supports for every citizen of Massachusetts, we need to further consider existing programs in support of the economic viability of families, both under the aegis of the federal government and that of the government of the Commonwealth.  Certain programs immediately come to mind, in this respect.  We will, below, consider food supports for lower income households in greater detail, but it suffices to say that we oppose the continuity of federal programs, like the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and other programs under the US Department of Agriculture, that have perennially been treated as political whipping boys by conservative politicians.  If such programs remain necessary to support the dietary needs of our poorest citizens, then we will enact them in Massachusetts and execute them in a manner that stresses the dignity and solidarity of all our citizens, in contrast to the perverse and puritanical moralizing that is doled out by our conservative countrymen as a price for obtaining meager quantities of assistance.  More pointedly, we will seek to organize communities in order to develop permanent structures of in-kind dietary assistance for households in need.

We do not, immediately, know how we intend to address elements of the federal income tax code related to the claiming of expenses by parents or guardians of dependent children, however our inclination is that we would seek to retain such deductions from the tax liability of parents and legal guardians even as we substantially reduce the overall burden of federal taxes across all American households.  The issue of dependent care deductions is a matter of fairness within a progressive tax structure toward households who maintain manifestly higher expenses in relation to earned incomes than households without dependents and, especially, without dependent children.  Insofar as we will maintain prohibitions and qualified restrictions against child labor at least for individuals under age fifteen, we cannot hinder the well being of households with multiple members legally barred from earning positive labor incomes.  Similarly, as we reconsider the structure of the income tax code of the Commonwealth, we would be well advised to incorporate dependent care deductions, both for minor children and for dependent elders.  We will enable heads of households, at least at lower income levels, to claim dependent care expenses in sufficiently expansive terms that no household should ever be compelled to bear an excess burden from care of dependent individuals without the support of the state.  Moreover, we will certainly consider the extension of tax expenditures in support of community child care initiatives, especially the sort of cooperative projects that we hope to organize from the outset of our community organizing activities.

We, likewise, briefly referenced our intentions with regard to the Medicaid system of federal-state partnerships in provision of health insurance for low income individuals and households.  We would reiterate our intentions, in this regard, to scrap the current structure of Medicaid and fold assistance to households for obtaining access to affordable health care into broader universal structures, incorporating either a single-payer methodology or a universal system of mandated private health insurance purchasing with accompanying subsidization of purchases for lower income households.  As with other components of federal assistance to households in need, we are determined to strip the federal government of any substantive role in supporting the day-to-day economic well being of our citizens.  Under our determined reinvention of domestic policy structures, the government of the Commonwealth will be the sole repository of redistributive justice for the citizens of Massachusetts.

To a substantial extent, the terms in which we have expressed our politics of the family to this point have been overwhelmingly economic, and this reflects a basic construction of the problem of familial integrity from a perspective stressing the capacity of households to command adequate material resources to provide for the basic needs of all their members.  Emphatically, if we were to end the discussion here, then we would be vastly oversimplifying the depth of the problem that we face in confronting the family as a subject of public policy.  As a matter of basic definitions, we still have not come to terms with what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts should comprehend in the concept of the family.  Should any household of cohabitating individuals be construed as a family, regardless of genetic connections or formalized legal unions?  How do we categorize groups of individuals with consanguineous connections and dependent financial relationships not otherwise characterized either by cohabitation or legal union?  To what degree should the presence of legal (marital) union between consenting adult individuals represent the definitive marker of the existence of a family?  If we were to retain a strictly liberal conception of the family, then we would certainly be merited in dually stressing economic relations of (mutual) dependence and strict adherence to legal affirmations between free consenting adult individuals.  Rather, several generations of thought regarding the structure of families and the social role of families as a bedrock of community have convinced us that we need to go beyond strictly liberal ideas on the legal and economic construction of the family and, in particular, on the responsibilities of parents toward children.     

A number of conditions exist within Massachusetts law that we are inclined to accept as given.  Absent any intervening transference of economic responsibility for the care of minor children from non-custodial biological/genetic parents to other parties, we would accept that biological/genetic parents bear some financial/economic responsibility for the well being of minor children whether or not they maintain custody of such children.  We will rigorously enforce child financial support responsibilities from non-custodial biological/genetic parents when custodial biological/genetic parents bear a relatively inferior capacity to earn incomes sufficient to maintain adequate care of minor children.  Conversely, how should we construe the rights and responsibilities of other individuals in the lives of minor children apart from biological/genetic parents?  What are the rights and responsibilities of grandparents, especially under circumstances when children are borne by individuals below the age of majority?  What are the rights and responsibilities of non-household figures, like educators, who engage in daily interactions with minor children?  In a certain sense, we need to clarify a broader nexus of legal rights and responsibilities in structural relationships involving minor children in the Commonwealth, both to protect the well being of minor children as subjects to the democratic will of the state and to establish boundaries on the rights and responsibilities of a range of adult individuals in their relationships with minor children, including biological/genetic parents.  Emphatically, all minor children shall enjoy a right neither to be confronted with coercive physical, emotional, or sexual  violence from any adult figure nor to be confronted with physical neglect of needs for shelter, nourishment, and adequate healthcare by caregivers.  Furthermore, we acknowledge that the emotional development of minor children is significantly shaped by their relationship with their custodial caregivers, and we must be mindful of circumstances when the mental and emotional health of children may be adversely impacted by their home environment even to the extent that their physical needs are being otherwise satisfied.  It is sufficiently clear to us, in this manner, that, while they may be presumed to enjoy custodial privileges at the outset, biological/genetic parents may cede their custodial privileges if they demonstrate a lack of responsibility in the care and nurturing of their children.  Beyond the relationship between biological/genetic parents and minor children, we clearly need to develop criteria for reassignment of custodial privileges either to non-parental biological/genetic relations (e.g. grandparents) or to transitional, non-biological/genetic foster parental agents when biological/genetic parents are deemed incapable of maintaining a custodial relationship with their minor children.  We support maintaining substantial discretion by assigned social workers in the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF), but it is abundantly clear that this agency has inadequate manpower to address its present workload, let alone potential expansions.  In this respect, assistance for DCF will constitute an important mission for the integration of the sort of temporary mandatory public work that we will outline below.  Moreover, it is manifestly clear that, over time, we will need to invest greater public assistance into bolstering child/juvenile psychological resources across the Commonwealth, minimally, in the interest of identifying and treating emotional/mental illness among children before such problems generate broader social pathologies among young adults.  

Before we move beyond inquiry into the status of minor children, we retain particular concerns over the status of minor children and adult individuals under the care and maintenance of their families or of other caretakers because they exhibit particular mental and/or emotional deficiencies.  Specifically, in this regard, we mean to address familial problems arising from care for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders and other developmental disorders that may hinder the capacity of particular individuals to function as fully capable and adequately socialized adults.  It is clear to us that the sources of developmental cognitive and socialization disorders are immensely complex.  They cannot, in any sense, be reduced to the influence of vaccinations or any other simplistic explanation, most of which seek to identify a ready scapegoat for which to cast blame on duplicitous third-parties.  And, as such, we understand why a great many families are inclined to accept such simplistic explanations and, thus, to actively resist the diagnostic and treatment recommendations of mainstream health professionals, especially with regard to the care of their children, for a wide range of medical conditions.  As a matter of public health alone, it is clear to us that we cannot remain silent when it comes to the resistance of families to vaccination of minor children from such diseases as measles or even influenza.  If only as a condition of participation in primary education outside of the home, we will seek to mandate a range of inoculations against readily transmissible childhood diseases, and, in this respect, we will do our utmost to dispel any conspiracy theories relating vaccinations to developmental disorders.  On the other hand, it is manifestly clear that we will need to go much farther.  Families with children exhibiting developmental disorders must be reassured that the government of the Commonwealth, their municipal governments, and their broader communities will support them in their specific needs to ensure that their children will have the best possible opportunities to enjoy a complete and satisfying life, even in the eventual absence of their immediate parental caregivers.  Emphatically, at the initial stages of this party's organization, we will need to take on the problems of families with developmentally challenged children as a particular dimension in our efforts to build community.  Failing to make such a commitment to the well being of such a demographic component within the Commonwealth would evoke a degree of callous partisan opportunism in our efforts among large numbers of households who lack either a sufficient explanation for the present condition of their loved ones or a satisfactory assurance of their future care, and we cannot afford to convey such a foul impression of ourselves.

   

Beyond the status of minor children, we have more fundamental issues about the definition of the family and its relation to the institution of civil marriage.  As we have argued in regard to the Constitutional overreach of the federal judiciary, we would insist that the definition of civil marriage is an exclusive function of the state government, and, in our view, marriage essentially constitutes a civil contractual relationship structured between consenting adult individuals and conferring a set of defined rights, responsibilities, and privileges.  We are satisfied that realization of the broader goals of the movement for marriage equality, incorporating marital rights for same-sex couples, have succeeded in ameliorating a fundamental social injustice, comparable to the injustices effected by restrictions on interracial unions in earlier generations.  On the other hand, we are concerned that expansions in the definitions of marriage have not gone far enough.  Emphatically, we are not experts on the psychological and emotional linkages between interpersonal affection and the institutional of civil marriage, but we are sufficiently satisfied that marital unions serve myriad practical purposes not excluded to love or to the assignment of parental rights and responsibilities.  Minimally, civil marriage establishes particular conditions for the assessment of income taxes in multi-person households and privileges particular non-biological/non-consanguineous relationships in lines of inheritance relative to biological/genetic connections.  In this regard, we might be willing to consider the legal sanctification of polygamous unions on the assumption that we could fully ensure the rights of all consenting adult members of such unions, including the right of each individual to vacate the legal terms of the union at will.  

Conversely, we are dubious of the legal character of certain unions sanctified exclusively through the medium of religious denominations.  Holy matrimony, however it is defined, is not identical to civil marriage, and we intend to clarify distinctions between sectarian matrimonial functions and civil marriage by mandating that state sanctification of a civil marriage union will require formal, written notarization by a non-ecclesiastical public authority.  We will forbid sectarian clerical figures from notarizing the institution of any civil marital union.  Similarly, we will not recognize the existence of a legally binding contractual relationship between consenting adult individuals in circumstances when a party to a sectarian matrimonial union seeks to vacate their union against the wishes of the other party and/or of their religious congregation.  We will not recognize the authority of a religious denomination to legally sanctify matrimonial unions between parties when one or more of the parties would be deemed incapable of delivering legal consent.  In particular, we will not recognize the legality of matrimonial unions involving minor children, minimally, below the age of fourteen and without the expressed, written consent of custodial parents or adult guardians below the age of majority.  In these circumstances, we will uphold the rights of parties seeking to vacate sectarian unions on the principle that, in the eyes of the Commonwealth, the state reserves the exclusive right to confer legal sanctification of any civil marital union, and no sectarian matrimonial union has any legal standing to bind two or more individuals in a legal contractual relationship capable of conferring the rights and responsibilities of civil marriage.  We recognize the importance of spiritual community to a wide spectrum of citizens of the Commonwealth, and, for these populations, holy matrimony will remain an important sacramental function, essential to religious practice in relation to the biological/genetic legitimation of the family.  On the other hand, we insist that the state has its own stake in the legitimation of the union of two or more individuals as a family in the eyes of the Commonwealth, and we will insist that any individuals seeking to embark on the legal rights and responsibilities of civil marriage comply with our own legal requirements, distinct and completely separate, in form and in substance, from sectarian matrimonial unions.  

In concluding, we wholly acknowledge that we cannot legislate of otherwise mandate love and mutual care between partners in a marital relationship or between parents and children.  Rather, we are hopeful that our own commitment to support community building and solidarity among our citizens will resonate in particular ways at the level of the family and that we firmly evoke our confidence in the importance of the family as a critical building block of community.  Our Commonwealth can only represent the broader family of our citizens to the extent that family, as an ethical construct and an ideal, can emerge from the strains that our particular era of American cultural and economic development have levied on it.  We aspire to contribute, in diverse ways, to the solidification of the family as an institution in Massachusetts.  To be clear, we expect that the meaning of family will change for us over time, particularly in relation to the evolving institution of civil marriage, but the enduring vitality of the family will remain critical to the success of our broader efforts to promote robust human development across the population of the Commonwealth.

    

Maintenance of Retirement Insurance and Care for the Aged  

Every working man and woman in humanity contributes their capacity to productively labor for years, in the interest of securing their own needs and those of their broader society, often mediated through the influence of the market.  Over years, however, the wheel of time grinds away at the vitality of every human body, diminishing the productivity of each and the aggregate productivity of the larger society.  Invariably, the labor force is pruned, both voluntarily and by mandatory retirement.  It would constitute an obscene degradation of the meaning of human existence if we reduced life to the performance of paid employment.  And yet, the transition from ones working years to retirement remains a critically important issue for every working person and for society writ large, as we consider the problems of maintaining aggregate consumption possibilities and the financial capacity of retired persons to meet basic needs, including nutrition, medical care, and housing.  Emphatically, we have already either asserted or implied the necessity to address wide ranges of basic social needs for all citizens of this Commonwealth, both by means of community organization and governmental action.  The specific needs encountered by retired individuals constitute a single species within the broader genus of our concerns in this regard, and we need to address some of those specificities now, with a particular emphasis on public retirement insurance as the default mechanism on which a great many retirees will rely.     

In our time, the status of federal retirement insurance in the United States has embodied a peculiar paradox.  As the generation born in the aftermath of the Second World War ages and exits the labor force in ever greater numbers, the growth of public liabilities within the Social Security system of the United States has begun to outstrip incoming cash flow, promoting a continuous decline in the reserved trust funds for Social Security Retirement benefits.  Smaller successive age cohorts in the American labor force, relative to the Baby Boom generation, have become increasingly less capable of replenishing the base of revolving payroll tax-based funds on which the Social Security retirement insurance system has relied since the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935.  The Social Security Retirement Insurance trust fund, which exists as a reservoir for surplus payroll tax payments over and above contemporaneous systemic needs, is being rapidly depleted.  By 2035, we would expect that this trust fund will cease to hold positive balances and that retirement payments will thereafter either need to be supplemented by increased revolving payroll tax receipts or be reduced to reflect systemic inadequacies in payroll taxes.  It is clear that a long term solution to the diminution of federal retirement funds that will enable the system to maintain a stable reserve of revolving funds must be conceived.  

Conversely, the divergent push and pull of partisan politics in the federal government has made the realization of such a long term solution impossible.  As we have sought strenuously to argue over the larger course of this document, the federal government and its policy makers are presently incapable of realizing any compromise solutions to the major problems facing the broader American public, and the fate of Social Security will be representative of the evident failure of American partisan politics to secure critical material needs for a significant demographic in the American polity.  In the absence of serious and sober deliberation and compromise within Congress and by the present and subsequent executive administrations, retired Americans are going to suffer grievously as the retirement insurance payments on which millions of them rely get smaller and smaller, both in absolute terms and in relation to growing costs of living.  The national Democratic Party, which remains either ignorant to the long term health of the Social Security trust funds or predisposed to ameliorative increases in payroll tax rates as the quintessential source of a resolution, is incapable of coming to terms of compromise with a national Republican Party, for whom any payroll tax rate increases are anathema and the best hope for a resolution resides in systemic privatization, transforming Social Security into a system of forced individual savings and investment, subject, in turn, to the profiteering motivations of private financial service providers and the inherent risks involved in trading a structure of guaranteed supplemental incomes for a financial casino, reliant wholly on the acumen of individual working age Americans as speculative investors.  Notwithstanding the determined advocacy by special interest lobbying groups like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), we would assert that this partisan divide over the fate of Social Security cannot be bridged.  Rather, any talk of resolving problems with the retirement insurance system has become politically toxic, as such discussions risk alienating substantial numbers of disciplined and highly active voters, open to manipulation by a wide range of different partisan media sources and vitriolic appeals to save Social Security from the irresponsible schemes floated by the other party.   

Before we offer our resolution to the problem of retirement insurance, we need to disentangle numerous aspects of the impending and evolving fiscal catastrophe evident in the Social Security system.  Most critically, what purposes should Social Security be expected to serve in the lives of retirees?  Is it a supplement to private retirement savings or a stand-alone income source for retirement?  Clearly, it can be either, and the fact that it often stands in the latter role implies that we bear a significant margin of responsibility in addressing the health of the Social Security system.  The initial drafters of the Social Security Act of 1935 certainly understood that the system they were creating would extend primary incomes to a wide range of impoverished old-age recipients.  For the creators of the Social Security system in the Roosevelt administration, the establishment of a reliable public income source for individuals and households without labor incomes by virtue of old-age was paramount.  They viewed the maintenance of old-age populations as a quintessential social responsibility and the repayment of a debt to laboring people for having sacrificed so much of their lives to social productivity.  For some segment of the American population, an imagination exists that most working age people should be continuously capable of undertaking requisite deductions from recurring consumption expenses in order to afford a private, individual retirement savings fund.  In this view, we would never need to provide public resources to insure against poverty in old-age populations.  American economic history has shown this view to be fallacious.  The onward ascent of living expenses at least since the 1970s, coupled with widespread stagnant rates of labor compensation, has demonstrated that a majority of American working people cannot afford to accumulate an individual retirement fund that will reliably cover their expenses after they have ceased paid employment, especially if life expectancy continues to increase, expanding the time-frame in which retirement savings must continue to support recurring consumption expenditures and ancillary medical expenses.  For these reasons, it is readily evident that we will need to comprehend public retirement insurance as a critical income source for the majority of individuals who receive it.

Beyond questions concerning the supplemental or critical character of retirement insurance, we need to consider the overall structure of receipts, payments, and investments in the Social Security system.  Since the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, the system has operated as a "pay-as-you-go" structure, with receipts from working-age populations employed immediately to cover payments to retirees.  In periods when working-age populations outnumbered retirees, the system generated pervasive surpluses that accumulated to develop and sustain trust funds that could be invested in public securities at modest rates of return.  Increasingly, as much larger age cohorts enter retirement against funding by smaller working-age cohorts, the system has begun running pervasive current-year deficits, incrementally draining the Old Age and Survivor benefit trust fund.  As argued, it is becoming increasingly clear that, if systemic reforms are not undertaken, either for funding, benefits, or investments, the retirement insurance trust fund will be completely drained in the near future.  We need to contemplate the nature of reform that needs to be undertaken to ensure that stability of the system.  Certainly, as national Democratic Party policy makers have suggested, the most logical way forward would involve a modest increase in payroll taxes to increase present year contributions to the system.  However, as argued, the political will does not exist to undertake such a reform within the federal government writ large.  Policy makers of the national Republican Party have, by contrast, suggested that we should undertake a minimally partial privatization of Social Security, transforming a public, collective, "pay-as-you-go" system into an individual system of forced retirement savings, invested into private portfolios with mixes of either public or private securities at divergent levels of personal risk for loss of principal.  Such a reform would, thus, destroy the collective character of public retirement insurance and place the onus for wise investment of retirement savings on individual retirees, potentially subjecting millions to the threat of abject poverty if they made bad investment choices over the course of their working years. The prospect of such an outcome strikes us not as an improvement but as an obscenity, a crime against the economic legacies of working people, and a brutal resignation of the ethos of collectivity minimally evoked by the common stake of all American citizens in the fate of a single, unitary retirement insurance system.

For our part, we are convinced that the fate of the Social Security retirement insurance system, together with its other component parts (survivor benefits and disability insurance) and the allied system of health care benefits associated with Medicare, cannot be resolved at the federal level.  As with every other segment of domestic policy that we have outlined in this document, we would assert that our present partisan divides in American political life have critically undermined the capacity of the federal government to realize definitive and sustainable resolutions to the social policy concerns facing the broader American public, and few areas of public policy represent more critical arenas in which the federal government needs to divest of its authority to realize a resolution than with public retirement insurance.  Definitively, we, of this party, want to see the entire Social Security system devolved, with the assets and liabilities attendant to the system transmitted, in total, to each of the state governments representing the needs of their own citizens as working-age contributors and old-age benefit recipients to the Social Security system.  As such, we, in the state capitols, would be responsible to our own citizens for developing our own state-level resolutions to the systemic deficiencies present at this moment in the history and development of Social Security. 

The devolution of Social Security would doubtless initiate a range of serious technical problems, especially concerning the interstate mobility of program recipients over time. In particular, if Massachusetts assumes responsibility for the assets and liabilities of the Social Security system contributed by its citizens, then how will Massachusetts confront the relocation of some subset of its old age populations to, say, Florida, the Carolinas, or Arizona? If an individual, over the course of their working life, contributes the totality of their retirement insurance contributions to the Social Security fund of a given state, then that state would be fully responsible to manage these funds and to undertake disbursements at the point of retirement, wherever the individual chooses to reside upon retirement. Massachusetts will certainly find itself disbursing retirement insurance funds to residents of retirement communities in other states. Conversely, how will we deal with individuals who come to Massachusetts in the middle of their working years, contribute some quantity of their retirement funds to Massachusetts and some to, say, Rhode Island, and then retire to a third state? In such a circumstance, we would presumably be liable to disburse some share of the total Social Security payments for such an individual and Rhode Island would be responsible for the remainder. More concretely, if the accumulation of Social Security funds was devolved to the states, then we would need to organize the accumulation of funds for each working age individual to explicitly direct such funds to particular states, preferably at the behest of each individual. Effectively, the national Social Security system would evolve into an opt-in marketplace, where each state would offer its own, unique resolution for the management of retirement insurance funds to working age individuals across the United States, contingent on the federal statutory requirement that all working age individuals must contribute to Social Security through payroll taxes. In the event that we initiate changes in payroll tax rates to employees and employers, then we would be compelled to clarify rules for contributions for the Social Security system of the Commonwealth, wherever contributors to the retirement insurance fund happen to reside and conduct business. Such complications would doubtless be multiplied by our insistence that all contributions to the Massachusetts Social Security fund be made in Massachusetts currency, again assuming that a single US dollar will cease to exist. Likewise, if we were to disburse funds to individuals residing in other states, then we would be compelled to shoulder the burden to convert such funds into local currency for the benefit of such recipients. As in so many other circumstances, we will not be deterred by complications in our quest to regain our sovereignty and to pursue the best interests of our citizens.

As a critical subordinate question in association with the broader fiscal sustainability of the Social Security system, both as it presently exists and as we would envision its future, we need to consider payment and vesting guidelines relative to the age of retirement for retirement insurance recipients. Under existing rules, individuals who choose to retire and begin claiming Social Security retirement insurance benefits at age sixty-two lose up to thirty percent of the full retirement age benefits that they would receive if they retired at age sixty-seven. Moreover, broader conversations concerning the long-term fiscal viability of the Retirement Insurance trust fund have involved, in part, the possibility of raising the age for full vesting of retirement insurance benefits above sixty-seven. Assuming extension of the life-expectancy of successive old-age cohorts, such a transformation would theoretically enhance the potential viability of the trust fund as individuals require benefits for longer and longer periods of retirement. Concretely, we reject any such general solution for maintenance of the viability of the Social Security retirement insurance trust fund. Additionally, it is clear to us that, if we are to create a retirement insurance system that is both fiscally viable in the long run and fair to all retirees, then we need to consider a range of conditions for full vesting of retirement benefits at a range of different ages, based critically on the nature of occupational employment performed by retirees. Emphatically, we would want individuals performing physically arduous or otherwise intensively physically demanding occupations to claim full retirement benefits at younger ages, perhaps as young as sixty. Conversely, we would want to retain full vesting at older ages, perhaps as old as sixty-nine, for other occupational cohorts for whom the physical characteristics of work tend to be conducive to a longer life expectancy upon retirement. Again, assuming we transform the Social Security system into an interstate opt-in marketplace, then vesting guidelines for each state Social Security fund will constitute an arena for interstate competition over contributions from working age individuals, and we will need to adjust our funding and payments guidelines in order to protect the long term viability of the Massachusetts retirement insurance fund in relation to the mix of occupational cohorts that become represented within the fund. Notwithstanding the latent complications involved in reconsideration of vesting guidelines, we consider such changes to be fundamental in order to secure a just set of conditions for individual working people to receive full retirement insurance benefits and enjoy a long and meaningful departure from the labor force.

If, to this point, we have emphasized the retirement insurance component of the Social Security system to the exclusion of its other component parts, we need to further recognize that a comprehensive solution to the growth of expenditures in every component of Social Security is ultimately required.   In this respect, the Disability insurance subset, with its own trust fund, must be stabilized, and the continued role of disability insurance as a necessary collective income support resource may need to be reconsidered.  We certainly understand that some portion of the working-age population of the Commonwealth will rely on income supports because long-term disabilities impede their capacity to earn positive labor incomes in fields for which they enjoy training and experience.   On the other hand, we think that the resources expended in this area would be better directed, in part, toward expeditious retraining and the redirecting of manpower toward fields in demand in our labor markets.  We do not envision a role for disability insurance as a permanent income support mechanism.  Rather, in place of such programs, we need to elaborate on the potential for a structure of universal basic income, and we will do so shortly.  

Assuming we pursue some methodology of universal basic income for all residents of our Commonwealth, we need to ask where the traditional institution of retirement insurance, evident in the Social Security system, will fit and what needs it might serve.  Emphatically, we would not envision a system of universal basic income that would, in any sense, afford luxuriant lifestyles.  Supplemental income sources will be required for most individuals if they would enjoy substantial consumption possibilities.   For old-age individuals, we would want a system of retirement insurance income transfers if only to open a space in labor markets for younger-age cohorts to advance within their occupational fields and to accumulate entry-level occupational experience that might otherwise be blocked if more experienced workers lack pecuniary incentives to retire.  The necessary continuity of a retirement insurance system alongside a broader system of public income transfers becomes apparent when we conceive of the more general macroeconomic objectives of inter-generational labor market regulation.  Conversely, as we articulate what we envision for a system of universal public incomes we will also articulate a vision of universal public work, and we will certainly seek to incorporate retirement-age cohorts within the broader base of labor from which we will draw for the latter, both to profit from their extensive degrees of occupational experience and to reinforce their importance as individual members of the community of citizens in our Commonwealth. If suffices to say that, notwithstanding our commitment to creating alternative universal public sources of income, we are not enthusiastic about the elimination of retirement insurance income transfers as a supplemental source of old-age income.  Social Security incomes will be fully maintained for old-age individuals contributing to the retirement insurance fund in Massachusetts.

It would be severely remiss for us to not consider, if only to contextual plans that we referenced above, the institutions of old-age health care and health insurance.  As we have already argued, we seek to deprive the federal government of any role in the institutions of health care and health insurance, and, in addition to the transferal of the assets, liabilities, and accumulated savings of the Social Security Retirement insurance system to each of the states, we will seek to transfer the assets, liabilities, and resources of the Medicare system to each of the states.  For our part, we are determined to see Medicare folded into a broader universal health insurance structure for the Commonwealth, and, as we have argued, this structure will either involve a single-payer tax-financed system or a system of tax-subsidized universal exchange purchases of private health insurance.  Moreover, in recent years, substantial attention has been accorded to cost control initiatives in the Medicare system, prefigured on the potential capacity of the larger system to negotiate lower prices for services and products, most notably pharmaceuticals, on behalf of the fiscal health of the larger system as it becomes responsible for the health maintenance of larger and larger old-age generational cohorts.  We are bullish on the general principles embodied in the renegotiation of costs with health care providers and the producers of medical and pharmaceutical products, and, whatever our universal health insurance structures look like, we are sufficiently intent on ensuring that cost management through systemic negotiation will be thoroughly baked into our plans, notwithstanding the potential counter-arguments of provider organizations and pharmaceutical corporations that such negotiations would tend to undermine private investments in innovative medicine.  If we have to do so, then we will directly invest public funds toward medical innovation, with thoroughly pronounced objectives, goals, and conditionalities to ensure a public return on investments.  In this regard, we are in no sense concerned that the adoption of more aggressive approaches to public cost control in health care will undermine the vitality of medical research and innovation in Massachusetts.

The status of old-age populations in the Commonwealth certainly need to be considered to the exclusion of the problems of retirement insurance and health insurance.  However we approach the potential continuity and transferal of federal programs into the hands of the states, it is clear to us that we need to conceive broader social policies to address the diverse needs of old-age populations.  Many of these needs mirror those of younger-age cohorts.  Housing remains a critical concern for every citizen of Massachusetts, and we will articulate a broader approach to housing policy and the development of space around the needs of all our citizens.  Most municipalities have maintained dedicated old-age housing resources.  If only as a single ameliorative to manifestations of housing discrimination by landlords, we support the continued maintenance of dedicated old-age housing.  Moreover, in the near term, as we build community-based resources within our municipalities, we need to seriously look into the status of public old-age housing resources, both to determine where deficiencies in the management of such resources may exist and where qualitative improvements, secured through the mobilization of community organization, can be advanced.  As we have argued throughout this document, we, as a party, need to build up from the organization of our communities to meet their immediate and ongoing needs, and securing the needs of our old-age populations is critically important in this regard.  We are going to intentionally develop broader community support organizations for our old-age populations, and we are going to simultaneously and intentionally seek to mobilize broad segments of our old-age populations to be active participants in diverse areas of our community organizing work, if only because they have a breadth of experience, knowledge, and personal commitment to their communities that would be ill-advised on our part to ignore.  Those people who have held the longest stake in the preservation and vitality of a community are often the ones who possess the the most passionate resolve to promote the sorts of changes that will strengthen it against all its ills.

Free Sexuality, Gender Equity, and the Dignity of Common Humanity 

In no small measure, we are compelled to concede that the Twentieth century and the opening decades of the Twenty-first have constituted a tumultuous moment in the history of human sexuality and gender relations, minimally within the countries of the West but, at least to some extent, throughout the broader expanse of common humanity.  Moreover, one can scarcely doubt why such a revolution in sexuality has occurred.  The promise of the Enlightenment to dispel the darkness of sectarian prejudice in diverse areas of social organization and cultural discourse finally bloomed, nurtured in turn by the radicalism of the Marxists, the feminists, and every other radical social movement that preached liberation from every encumbering and irrational institutional relic of the feudal and patriarchal past.  The struggle to allow women to stand as free and equal subjects of democratic citizenship before the law was being won, and, as they increasingly contributed their voices to deliberation of broader domestic social policies, legal constraints on human sexuality eroded.  Women were to be freed from the encumbrance of relegation to reproductive vessels and, over time, human sexuality would be increasingly comprehended as a multi-dimensional social practice, irreducible to reproduction.  The door would increasingly open to acceptance of divergent conceptions of love and sexual relations.  Homosexual unions would gradually gain legal sanctification.  The role of medical science in enabling individuals to pursue gender reassignment in realization of their own understandings of personal identity began to assume a degree of regularity, validated by a wider acceptance of gender diversity and fluidity.  

It would be fallacious for us to argue that such changes occurred without resistance from backward looking cultural conservatives or to assert that every transformation of gender and sexual relations exists in a state of inviolability against challenges to turn back the clock.  Every revolution breeds its own counter-revolutionaries.  Significantly, we recognize that our motivations for this partisan project have been fueled in part by our perceptions that a cultural-sexual counter-revolution is brewing in other state governments, within the halls of Congress, and, critically, in the federal judiciary.  As we have argued relative to individual legal autonomy of women in reproductive decisions, the federalization of debate over human sexuality has contributed to the toxic character of federal governance in our time.  Moreover, we concede that any foreclosure of a federal role in such debates will free state governments in places like Arkansas and Idaho to not only strip women of reproductive liberty but also criminalize homosexuality and enact diverse manifestations of legal discrimination against trans-gender individuals.  We recognize our inability to stop the enactment of rampant sexually reactionary policies among our countrymen.  Moreover, we acknowledge that some degree of acceptance and support for such policies remains within discrete groups inside Massachusetts.  In particular, certain highly influential sectarian organizations and their supporters continue to embody distinctly backward-looking perspectives on sexuality.  While many of us enjoy an enduring connection to such faith traditions, we have to simultaneously recognize that our own moral conclusions and those of the faith traditions that shaped us must evolve by virtue of compassionate respect for difference and faith that the maintenance of individual liberty will nurture peaceful and orderly societies conducive to human development.  Rather, we are determined that our Commonwealth will remain a space of sexual freedom, that every adult individual standing on our sovereign soil will never be deprived of personal bodily autonomy and the freedom to engage with other adult individuals in consensual sexual interactions, and that no individuals, adult or child, will be compelled to engage in actions that transgress their capacity to exercise active sexual consent.           

As with every other subject we have considered in this context, we need to unpack our own conceptions on how we intend to move forward on the politics of human sexuality.  Critically, with regard to community organization, we have to acknowledge that the politics of sexuality represent a sticking point for a great many of our neighbors in Massachusetts.  Especially with older generational cohorts, basic morality comports with certain iron laws on sexual practices, including on the propriety of individual sexual preferences diverging from monogamous heterosexuality.  Emphatically, we are not going to make many friends by lecturing our neighbors on the reactionary and bigoted character of their personal beliefs.  To the extent that we are inclined to make arguments regarding sexual morality, we are, therefore, constrained to play most strongly toward our support for individual liberties against unrestrained exercise of governmental power in the lives of individuals.  This conclusion will be unsatisfying for at least some of us and some of the people with whom we converse, and that is just too bad.  No organization that seeks to pursue a radical rethinking of as many aspects of everyday life as we do can ever be satisfied with playing the old classical liberal card.  Furthermore, as we suggested above, we have legitimate concerns about the health of the family as an institution in our Commonwealth that may, in certain ways, be construed to both converge and conflict with our perspectives on sexuality.  We adamantly support marriage equality, but we likewise support an extension of the concept of legal marriage to incorporate a range of non-traditional, polyamorous contractual and consensual unions between adult individuals.  For many supporters of a more traditional morality and conception of the family, this may be too much to bear.  Our incorporation of certain radical institutions may have to wait for years or decades for us to build broader community support for our ideas.  If we have to act as consistent liberals today in order to stand as ardent radicals tomorrow, then we will consistently maintain our support for the democratic principle in our Commonwealth throughout.

With regard to legal structures and prohibitions, we certainly support every effort to remove legal prohibitions on a range of sexual behaviors among consenting adult individuals.  In particular, we have in mind certain sections of the Massachusetts General Laws contained in Part II, Title III on "Domestic Relations" and Part IV, Title I, Chapter 272 on "Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order."  Before we continue in this direction, we need to consider, however, in this context, our arguments above on the support of families.  As suggested, we consider the family a bedrock institution of community that needs active support from the state.  And, further, a substantial part of the problem concerns our apprehensions regarding the definition of the family and the particular way in which such definitions interact with the problem of sexual relations between individuals.  Sexual relationships do not necessarily constitute familial relations although they can structure such relations.  To the extent that this is the case, we want to make it clear that we support a broadening of the contractual possibilities for civil marriage and that our purposes in doing so concern, at least in part, our convictions regarding free sexuality as a component of individual liberty.  Insofar as particular elements of our general laws conflict with these commitments, we are going to remove them from application against our citizens.

The specific provisions of Part IV, Title I, Chapter 272 governing the institution of sexual prostitution need to be expressly considered as we pursue a broader politics of sexual liberty in our Commonwealth.  Will there be a legal marketplace for the contracting of sexual labor in a sovereign Commonwealth of Massachusetts?  It is our position that, were we to continue to prohibit such a market, prostitution would continue to flourish underground, outside of the regulatory reach of the Commonwealth.  Emphatically, we are going to legalize prostitution and regulate the sale and purchase of sexual services in order to maintain the health and safety of both practitioners of such services and their clients.  We will compel prostitutes to register with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), they will be tested periodically for the presence of sexually transmitted diseases, and, if they test positive, they will be legally barred from continuing their practices under criminal penalty for transgression of our authority.  We will regulate certain elements in the exchange of sexual services, including, but not excluded to, the utilization of contraceptive technologies by practitioners and/or clients.  The industry will be taxed, in part, to cover expenses attendant with its legal regulation.  

Moreover, we recognize that the presence of prostitution in a community elicits a range of externalities that we will have to address.  We definitively intend to isolate the sale and purchase of sexual services to certain, well-defined spaces, outside of which solicitation will be legally barred.  Sites for the purchase of sexual services will be simultaneously marked and publicly well advertised but discrete.  Their design and layout will, within limitations, be subject to public regulation in the interest of the health and safety of practitioners and clients, and they will be subject to periodic inspection by the DPH to ensure that good hygiene is being maintained.  We will ensure that such designs enable clients and practitioners to enjoy substantial degrees of privacy in the course of transacting services.  It is unclear to us, at this moment, what form the operations and management of legally authorized brothels might take.  Specifically, will prostitutes be employees of employers, independent contractors in rented, shared work spaces, or, perhaps, member-owners in a cooperative enterprise?  It is possible that each of these types of enterprise might proliferate within the market for sexual services in Massachusetts.  Definitively, we are, however, determined that every sex worker in an authorized enterprise will be a consenting adult individual engaged in a contractual relationship with a legally authorized enterprise, that their employment will respect any regulation we deem necessary to apply toward the industry in particular, and that labor will be compensated in accordance with the generally applicable terms of Massachusetts labor law.  No sex worker in our Commonwealth will ever suffer the indignity of being treated as someone else's property or suffer physical or emotional abuse at the hands of their employer.  Nor will we question the morality or impugn the decency of any sex worker's life choices.  And when sex workers decide to transition to other fields of employment, we will confer to them, as necessary, a non-judgmental hand to move forward with their lives.  In our Commonwealth, we will be motivated by a new general conception of morality, grounded in human development and mutual care within our communities, and this conception of morality will inform our approach to sexuality in general and to the sale of sexual services in particular.  We will treat sex workers like every other worker in every other industry in our Commonwealth and accord them the dignity that every human being who toils to pay their bills and create a better life for themselves by means of the marketplace merits.  

In these regards, we understand that individual municipalities have a clear incentive to inhibit the location of legally authorized and regulated brothels within their municipal boundaries, if only to protect local real estate values.  It is our intention to work closely with municipalities and defer to their decisions on zoning and prohibition of certain businesses within their boundaries, however we have to simultaneously recognize that, if we are unable to locate legal brothels anywhere within the Commonwealth, then the sex industry will go completely underground in defiance of our best inclinations to regulate it in the public interest.  We cannot allow that to happen.  If we have our way on the regulation of sex work, then we will almost certainly find ourselves coming into conflict with municipal officials who, despite transparently good intentions, stifle our best efforts to achieve meaningful social progress in Massachusetts in a wide range of policy areas.  There will be a sufficient number of legal brothels in Massachusetts to meet the level of demand that we understand to exist within our boundaries.  They will be geographically dispersed to meet levels of localized demand for sexual services.  We will make it clear that the solicitation of services in such establishment is reserved for consenting adult individuals and that they will never be located in proximity to schools or other environments catering to the needs of minors.  And if we must convey carrots or brandish sticks to secure compliance from local officials with our plans in this policy area, then we will do so as necessary.

To the extent that we have conveyed our intentions with regard to the legalization of exchange in sexual services, it further seems clear to us that we need to elaborate on numerous aspects of our conceptions of sexual morality, particularly with regard to the status of minors and the influence of sectarian denominations in Massachusetts.  Manifestly, the bedrock assumption in our conception of sexual morality is that of consent to sexual relations between adult individuals.  Any divergence from this assumption on sexual relations demands scrutiny on our part to determine the prospective role of the state in prohibiting and penalizing transgressive behavior, and the capacity to freely exercise consent remains the most critical element in this manner.  Moving beyond sexual relations, however, we additionally need to consider the public transmission of sexualized imageries and public performance of activities conveying sexual connotations.  And we do need to consider a range of nominally transgressive public behaviors that might otherwise be penalized for sexualized public indecency.  How is our conception of sexual morality shaped by these questions and how do they illuminate our prescriptions for a policy agenda?

Certain questions here are easy to resolve.  We are not going to criminalize public urination under the authority of the Commonwealth as a sexually indecent act or allow any municipality to do so.  Rather, we are going to work to ensure that there are readily accessible public or private restroom facilities at least within our urban spaces so that no man or woman is compelled to squat behind a bush or rush into a dark alley to relieve themselves.  In the event that an individual is compelled to urinate in a relatively discrete fashion in an unauthorized public space, they will be fined for a nominally unhygienic practice and sent on their way without compulsion to publicly register as a sex offender.  Some matters of public policy command such an overwhelming weight of common sense and simply humane virtue to ever be ignored.

Issues concerning the public presentation or transmission of sexualized imageries and various acts of performance art that carry sexual overtones are far more complicated.  In our opinion, regulation of such actions ultimately turn on the problems of access by minors and by adult individuals who, for personal moral reasons, might otherwise be offended by public displays of sexual content.  They likewise raise questions concerning the purely artistic motivations of particular demonstrations and the overriding commercial purposes embodied in certain other representations of sexual imageries.  For adult audiences, particularly those with connections to relatively conservative sectarian traditions, we understand the nature of concerns regarding public demonstrations of a sexual nature.  Manifestly, we will be performing a balancing act as we move forward to protect both the rights of sectarian groups to defend their own collective  conceptions of decency and the rights of artists to pursue their own projects, conforming to their own sets of influences and their own conceptions of meaning, free from public interference.  To the extent that the latter are capable of pursuing their work with a degree of discretion toward those who would be offended by their actions, we find little rationale for intervening in artistic freedom.  Conversely, we will need to consider the development or retention of rules governing content warnings on artistic works that may contain sexually offensive material in the same sense that we will have to consider such warnings on materials containing graphic violence.  Such warnings clearly have a place in regulating access to controversial works for either adult audiences or for children.  

We, further, recognize that questions arise here with regard to the choice of media selected by artists.  The government of the Commonwealth and the various municipal authorities across Massachusetts will, of course, maintain a significant degree of control over real time performances, stationary presentations, and the dissemination of published materials in a physical form.  Open broadcast media may, likewise, present minimal issues for the purposes of public regulation.  The dissemination of works via digital media across the internet may, conversely, raise more substantial concerns with regard to the efficacy of public regulation.  These questions will remain open as we move forward, in particular, toward an uncertain and incomplete  devolution of authority in the regulation of digital media from the federal government toward increasingly sovereign state governments.  However, we seek to assert our intention, in this regard, that artists who seek to disseminate their works via digital media to audiences in Massachusetts will be accorded a substantial degree of deference to determine when their works merit some form of content warning and, to the extent that they make responsible self-regulatory decisions, we are not going to act as paternalistic censors of artistic tastes for our citizens. 

               

It is similarly clear to us that, as long as marketing has existed to facilitate commerce, sexualized images of human bodies have been used to sell products.  If we are not prepared to act as censors for the artistic preferences of Massachusetts citizens, then we are similarly incapable of drawing meaningful distinctions between instances in which sex is used to convey deep, pure artistic meaning and others in which it is used  to sell automobiles or mouthwash.  It is beyond our purposes in this document to advance a theory of the psychological influence of sexuality on the capacity of human beings to crave particular objects.  Furthermore, we are not enemies of free commerce.  It is clear to us that, in our Commonwealth, there will remain certain limits on the capacity of marketers to post public images of a sexual nature in order to sell their commodities.  No advertised agency will be permitted to publicly post images of exposed human genitalia in order to sell hygiene products, hot dogs, or anything else.  Conversely, we understand that there are degrees of nuance in the presentation of sexual images for commercial purposes and that the utilization of such images can frequently nurture more pure artistic purposes and instances of social criticism.  Beyond certain basic regulatory standards, we are going to grant marketers a degree of deference to self-regulate their use of sex in advertising in Massachusetts, and we will step in only when lines have very evidently been crossed.

We acknowledge that the status of minors with regard to the institution of public policies governed by new conceptions of sexual morality will be problematic, and it will be critically important for us to elaborate what we need to do in order to meaningfully and purposefully prepare young people to enter into adulthood as responsible agents in a society marked by sexual liberty.  At the outset, we need to elaborate on the practice of sexual education as a matter of public educational curriculum.  In this regard, we intend to ensure that every minor student in Massachusetts will receive a thorough instruction on biological sexuality, human reproduction, means of contraception and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, the ethics and multi-faceted purposes of interpersonal sexual interaction and definitions of consent, the evolving definitions of gender, sexual orientation, and the evolving inflection of social institutions around sexual differentiations.  We will develop course instruction for teachers in the Commonwealth to enable better formulation of pedagogical methodologies to facilitate effective sexual education, and we will outline standards for the age-appropriate character of certain aspects of sexual curriculum in order to appeal, in part, to the sensitivities of parents with regard to particular subjects.  Conversely, no parent will be empowered to opt out of sexual education for their children, whether those children are educated in public district schools, public charter schools, private schools, or by means of home schooling.  We have already argued that we will pursue a clarification of the responsibilities of adult figures in the lives of minor children, including those of custodial caregivers and educators, but we need to reassert our basic conclusion with regard to public education in general.  Emphatically, the thorough instruction of every child in the Commonwealth, as a matter of public policy, is the exclusive responsibility and province of the state, wherever they happen to receive their education, and we regard the provision of a thorough education on human sexuality to be as important to students in Massachusetts as instruction of English grammar and mathematics.  If private educators, particularly ones associated with certain conservative sectarian traditions, choose to augment our curricula on sexuality with their own reflections on sexual morality, then they will be wholly free to do so, but we will hold them to account if and when they fail to expose their students to those elements of our curriculum that we deem essential to the larger public interest of the Commonwealth with regard to sexual education.  Sexuality is and will remain an important dimension in the lives of every human being, and we are determined that every child educated in our Commonwealth will enter into adulthood with a healthy and affirmative understanding of their sexuality and especially of their capacity to exercise positive consent in sexual relations.

Beyond formal sexual education, we need to acknowledge that there will be certain streams of information and messaging on diverse media and existing social practices that are and will remain inappropriate for children.  Emphatically, any physical sexual acts performed by adults on minors minimally under the age of sixteen will, in the eyes of the Commonwealth, be considered coerced.  We will not legally recognize the capacity of minors under age sixteen to exercise positive consent in sexual relations with adults.  Any adult individual who performs sexual acts with a minor under the age of sixteen will be compelled, in addition to criminal penalties, to register as a sex offender with the government of the Commonwealth and subjected to restrictions in their contacts with minor individuals until such time that the state is satisfied of their rehabilitation.  Similarly, we recognize that physical sexual relations between minors under the age of sixteen need to be accorded a degree of legal scrutiny to determine when individual participants to a sexual act are factually capable of exercising positive consent and whether positive consent was factually granted by both parties.  We acknowledge that minors have always experimented and will continue to experiment with sexual relations.  We are not going to stop teenagers and pre-teens from having sex.  On the contrary, we are going to give them the educational tools and access to materials that will hopefully encourage them to act responsibly in the use of contraception and management of risk for other consequences of sexual activity.  And we are going to aggressively police consent.  We will prosecute individuals who compel partners to engage in sexual activity without their positive consent, whatever the age of such individuals.  We will additionally police the transmission of sexualized images of individuals by others without their consent, by whatever media and whatever the ages of individuals involved.  Emphatically, we understand that minors will engage in sexual relations, but they will continue to do so under the legal constraints that we deem necessary to impose and to enforce, and, furthermore, those constraints will exist to broadly reinforce our commitments to institutionalize sexual liberty under positive individual consent as an overriding social virtue for our Commonwealth.  We will raise children into adult men and women capable of recognizing the freedom and subjectivity of their partners.

We, likewise, need to reinforce our commitment to support and affirm diversity in sexual orientations and in gender identities among minors through education and in our approach to sexual activity among minors.  Hetero-normative sexual preferences will not be prioritized in sexual education.  Rather, we will seek to construct curricula that are age-appropriate at each level but that will emphatically support a range of alternative sexual practices and encourage minors to develop their own sense of self, relative to others and to their own understanding of their sexuality and gender.  In this respect, the formation of individual understandings of gender and sexuality appears largely indeterminate to us.  Our role as policy makers will be to facilitate educational processes without stifling the capacity of young people to learn for themselves who they are, even if such understandings transgress prevailing norms of sexuality and gender.  And if and when individual young people come to the conclusion that their further development in life must be accomplished through transitioning from the sex and gender of their birth to a physiological reassignment of their sex organs, then we will do our best to thoroughly balance the needs of such individuals relative to the responsibilities of their custodial caregivers and their larger communities in order to ensure that transitioning children have access to both medical and psychological resources that will enable them to make appropriate choices in their own health and welfare.  We acknowledge that both the possibilities and perils of medical science in gender reassignment and our own commitments to the solidity of the family as a bedrock of community will shape our approach to gender transitioning, especially as it pertains to minor children in our Commonwealth.  

                     

We are confident that the actions we contemplate with regard to the extension of sexual liberty for adult individuals in Massachusetts and with regard to the sexual education of minors will render us pariahs in the minds of a great many of our countrymen in the other states.  Pastors in Texas and the Dakotas will rail to their congregations about the evils perpetrated by those perverse, deviant, godless radicals in Massachusetts, about our support for homosexuality and for gender reassignment to children and about our legal sanctioning of prostitution.  We will be, to them, the epitome of every disorder in a divinely ordained universe, defiling the sanctity of the family and the biological centrality of human reproduction as the sole operative principle governing sexuality.  Our actions will not, however, be perpetrated to spite their sensibilities but to defend our own confidence that sexuality is an integral component in the human condition and that a sovereign body of free citizens can only preserve itself in a state of liberty.  We will scrap the edifice of every federal intrusion into the sex lives and the sexual and gender identities of Massachusetts citizens as elements of overreach in the Constitutional responsibilities of the federal government, and the representatives of our conservative countrymen will never stifle the domestic liberty of our citizens ever again.  Furthermore, we will liberate our citizens from a wide range of antiquated and irrational constrictions in our General Laws on their rights to order their sex lives and their gender identities as they choose.  We will enshrine the principle of positive consent as the bedrock of interpersonal sexual relations, and, through our efforts to reform the institutions of health care and, in particular, access to reproductive health, we will ensure that every citizen of our Commonwealth will be invested with the resources to enjoy fulfilling sexual relationships within the broader structure of their being and becoming in community with their fellow citizens.   

The Future of Labor Markets, Automation, and Universal Basic Income

If we cannot envision reform of our public educational systems with strict recourse to the needs of labor markets, then it, similarly, stands to reason that the evolution of our labor markets will largely defy our capacities to engage in any substantive regulation.  The macroeconomy of this Commonwealth is not only linked to those of the other states by virtue of our political and Constitutional connections, but it is also intimately tied to the fluctuations and cycles of development of the myriad commercial networks constituting the global economy.  Labor markets reflect a single dimension of the global economy, and, as a function of technological change, patterns in corporate governance and entrepreneurial strategies, and regulatory dynamics in divergent governance locales, many local labor markets are constantly in flux.  On the one hand, we need to recognize when and how labor markets in the Commonwealth change and whether state regulation can meaningfully impact such changes to mitigate their effects, enable disadvantaged populations to transition between occupational fields, and support struggling entrepreneurs to navigate changes and maintain available labor resources or, alternatively, to incorporate labor saving technologies in ways that may benefit the competitive position of Massachusetts firms over the longer term.  On the other hand, we need to do what we can to ensure that the outcomes of labor market transactions do not, individually, constitute the critical pivot points in the day-to-day existence of our citizens or, collectively, steer the overall direction of our broader macroeconomy.  Rather, we need to create the circumstances where individual working people enjoy multiple degrees of freedom in the selection of a desired occupational field and in the choice to enter into gainful employment with a particular employer.  In this respect, the idea of a universal basic income may play a key role.  

Conservative opinion on economic policy would have it that the logic of supply and demand alone should determine compensation rates for workers throughout our macroeconomies, and that any intervention on the behalf of workers, to minimize income inequalities or to boost minimum compensatory rates for the least skilled, either by the state or by labor organizations, can only exacerbate inefficiencies and perpetuate market failures, thus diminishing total employment.  We must acknowledge, at least in part, that there is something to be said for these perspectives.  Every effort made by the state to enforce higher minimum wages must have an impact on the aggregate level of employment, the demographic composition of the employed labor force, the aggregate price level, or the pricing structures in individual markets for articles of consumption.  On the other hand, real market outcomes are never theoretic abstractions.  They are outcomes of particular contexts, structured by law, public policy, cultural dynamics, and a wide range of other particularities not immediately related to the quantitative contours of supply and demand.  The state always maintains an important role in constituting market outcomes, whether that role arises from the maintenance of strict laissez-faire conditions or it forces markets entirely underground by virtue of legal prohibition.  To the extent that we regard minimum wages not merely as income supports for the lowest skilled workers in our macroeconomy but as basic community standards on economic justice in labor market transactions, we, of this party, will support periodic increases in state-mandated minimum wage rates for the lowest skilled workers of the Commonwealth.  

Conversely, we need to remain wary of the unfounded presumption that minimum wages should enable the lowest skilled workers to entirely secure a minimum threshold of subsistence and to stay above the poverty line, however we choose to define such a threshold, on forty hours of work each week.  In Massachusetts, such a presumption would lead us to raise the minimum wage above $20 per hour, in present value US dollars, in a macroeconomy with a very high level of basic living expenses.  We would create conditions in which it would be virtually impossible for new entrepreneurs to forge ahead in new business startups in industries reliant on less skilled labor, especially in labor-intensive service sector processes, because hourly labor expenses would be wholly prohibitive under competitive output market conditions.  However we proceed to take into account the full range of human needs exhibited by our citizens and our responsibility to act in order to shape macroeconomic outcomes, we will need to acknowledge that free markets cannot achieve all of the economic developmental goals that we seek to realize.  In particular, labor markets cannot be expected to secure a basic standard of living for the lowest skilled workers on a forty hour per week standard.  To the extent that we seek to ensure that every household in Massachusetts can secure stable housing, access to basic health care, food security, and a margin of discretionary income to participate in a consumption oriented economy, we will be compelled to invest tax-payer funded resources in a wide range of public goods.  There will be a range of public housing support initiatives for lower income groups, as well as either subsidization of private health insurance or a full-blown tax-financed single-payer insurance system and partial subsidization of nutritional consumption.  All of these measures will have to be incorporated within a macroeconomic context in which minimum wages will never be able to keep pace with the continuous rise in living standards and with continuous increases in the prices of consumer goods and services.  In the end, labor markets can never be relied upon to deliver subsistence consumption needs for all of our citizens, and, for the sake of our entrepreneurs, we will not treat labor market mechanisms as if that should be the case.  

Briefly, before we engage in further speculations on our desired course for the labor markets of a sovereign Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it is worth considering the fate that we intend to accord the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regime of the federal government, inclusive of the federal minimum wage, overtime rules, and a range of non-discriminatory standards applicable for workers engaged in interstate commerce.  In concert with our broader ambivalence toward all federal regulation of interstate commerce, we find the regime of the FLSA utterly inadequate to the needs of maintaining living standards for hourly wage workers, especially at the lowest skill levels.  Real wage levels mandated under FLSA, adjusted for inflation, have steadily declined under the longer history since FLSA's passage in 1938.  US Labor Department regulators of the FLSA regime have continuously governed over a deterioration of the efficacy of standards contained within the act, as firms have skirted compliance and regulators have responded with band aids, reclassification of different categories of employees for the purposes of FLSA, and other capitulations.  For our part, we regard FLSA as largely useless and we intend to dispense with it entirely.  We would rather set the fate of our workers in Massachusetts entirely in the hands of our General Court than concede any role for the federal government in regulation of labor markets anywhere in the United States.  There will be no federal minimum wage, no federal overtime pay standards, no federal standards prohibiting discriminatory pay structures between different categories of employees, and no federal prohibitions of child labor.  We will attend to these matters ourselves, and we will, likewise, determine what is to be done when our countrymen in certain other states decide to allow firms under their jurisdiction to pay their workers obscenely low wages, incapable of affording them a reasonable standard of living when combined with absurdly meager public safety nets, or allow children as young as twelve to engage in production of goods and services destined for the Massachusetts marketplace.  Emphatically, we will erect legal restrictions on commerce with firms in other states that will not comply with standards that we deem minimal to any conception of fairness, especially when they compete with our own firms.  We will decide who, outside of our state, gets to sell either producer or consumer goods and services in this Commonwealth, relative, in part, to the manner in which firms approach labor.

With regard to enforcement of anti-discrimination measures under federal law, we, further, intend to eliminate the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and scrap Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  If robust enforcement of anti-discrimination policy relative labor markets is important to the broader functioning of labor markets and their ability to deliver abundant opportunities for all of our citizens, and we absolutely think that it is, then we will embark on the development of our own robust enforcement mechanisms, through expansion of the capacity of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) to police labor market and workplace discrimination among Massachusetts employers on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, physical and/or mental disability, religion, ethnicity, age, and any other conceivable subject categorization. In specific reference to gender-based compensatory differentials, we will pursue remediation of discriminatory compensatory rates across job classifications with divergent proportional gender compositions through a rules-based regime configured on the principle of equal pay for comparable worth.  In these terms, we are committed, over time, to the elimination of gender-wage differentials as a pervasive macroeconomic pattern across this Commonwealth.  

 

Dispensing with any federal role in the regulation of labor markets and, simultaneously, recognizing that we cannot regulate compensatory rates for workers at the lowest skill tiers of our labor market in order to achieve all of our goals in uplifting living standards at these tiers, we need to consider alternative measures to increase incomes at the lower end of the income scale.  Such measures will certainly involve tax expenditures, and we seek to make such measures universal, for a range of reasons.  In the longer term, we will restructure our macroeconomy to enact a vision of fundamental economic fairness, relative to the multi-generational familial accumulations of wealth within our population, the perpetuation of income and wealth inequalities, disproportional accumulations of financial debt, disproportionalities in access to health care, housing, and nutritional consumption across our population, and uneven capacities to engage in a consumer oriented macroeconomy, either as a consumer, a worker, an investor, or an entrepreneur.  In these terms, it is clear to us that such a new macroeconomy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts must be characterized both by abundant opportunities for free enterprise and the accumulation of substantial incomes by risk-taking individuals and, simultaneously, by reasonable restrictions in the accumulation of wealth by individuals, especially through the mechanism of inheritance.  The issues introduced here demand a more substantial consideration as we elaborate our position on taxation, but they also serve as an introduction to our own consideration on the utility of a universal basic income as a binding element of belonging for all individuals within our Commonwealth.  

If we maximize the freedom of entrepreneurs within our macroeconomies, then, with regard to labor markets, we will be enabling firms to engage in aggressive labor-saving measures, including outright automation of tasks previously undertaken by human labor.  Such measures invariably enable a continuous diminution of labor incomes as a share of total macroeconomic outputs relative to capital incomes.  Capital will pervasively increase its share of incomes by destroying labor and, in so doing, leave an increasing share of our populations idled and deprived of an increasing share of opportunities for the earning of income.  Retraining and redirecting labor resources to new or otherwise technologically-insulated occupational fields can help to offset some of the negative effects of automation, but, at least in some measure, populations will continue to be left behind by our best efforts to enable workers to adjust to change.  To the extent that we are satisfied with such an imagery for the future of production technology in our macroeconomy, especially insofar as we continue to aspire to remain active as a region engaged in competitive manufacturing industries, we are confronted with a reality in which we will have no choice but to actively engage in ex post redistributions of income from capital to labor.  We cannot allow a growing share of our population to become functionally redundant and impoverished.  On the other hand, if we were to introduce such measures as pure, unidirectional transfers, uplifting the unemployed poor without giving anything to middle income groups and treating the wealthy as pure objects for siphoning incomes downward, then our efforts would invariably become objects of disdain for everyone left out of the distribution of governmental largess and recipients would appear as parasites feeding off the public trough.  We cannot extend distribution to privileged subsets of our population on the pure basis of need, and we, likewise, cannot give away anything to anyone free of charge and without some measure of social contribution in return.  

If we, as a party, begin our broader project with an intensive focus on community organizing, then, as we achieve a sufficient threshold of political power in the government of the Commonwealth, our efforts will evolve to encompass the active mobilization of all our citizens in the work of collective governance and the satisfaction of the needs of local communities, especially in particular labor-intensive processes.  From the collective, community-directed labor of many, we will address a wide range of needs currently secured either through the market or by paid public bureaucrats, and, in return, we will deliver tax-based dividends for every citizen of the Commonwealth, not as charity but as compensation for the enhanced responsibility to our collective well being that we will demand of all our citizens.  Every citizen, however wealthy or poor, will be, periodically if infrequently, tasked to undertake labor and present their unique set of skills and aptitudes at the request of their government and, in return, every citizen will share in a basic, universal distribution of income.

In practical terms, our assumption is that the introduction of a joint structure of universal public work and universal basic income will have numerous beneficial effects.  It will help to establish a collective ethos of solidarity, by bringing a diversity of citizens together to undertake the work of citizens in support of the collective well being of our communities.  It might be objected that any involuntary conscription of free citizens to undertake community work should breed antipathy among our citizens because of the forced nature of such work.  We would counter that such a criticism is too broad in encompassing every manifestation of community work.  If, in this light, certain individuals might have an adverse opinion of service on a grand jury, then the same individuals might have a more positive opinion on service in support of local public health authorities, checking in on households of aged shut-ins or on veterans requiring intervention for emotional health issues.  Similarly, if certain young people, emerging from secondary education, might have an adverse opinion regarding obligatory service in the National Guard, then the same individuals might have a higher opinion of mandatory service as mentors and teaching assistants for younger students at the primary school level.  In this sense, within limits, it will behoove us to offer a range of choices to individuals in order to complete mandatory service requirements, especially for young people.  Moreover, to the extent that we limit the length of time demanded from each citizen for each period of community work and we limit the number of times during a long term period in which we call each citizen into service, we will ensure that every citizen of the Commonwealth will have adequate opportunities to feel like they are actively contributing to the common good in their communities but not so many that they feel they are being worn out and wholly deprived of the free use of their time by the state.  Likewise, we will mind the limitations that individuals may confront, especially with regard to familial responsibilities and transportation constraints.  Conversely, by connecting a universal basic income standard with universal community service requirements, we will remove, to a significant extent, an accompanying stigma around the idea that some individuals may receive the majority of their yearly incomes from tax distributions.  We will not make such payments exorbitant or the lifestyle that they enable luxuriant, but, between income distributions, health insurance subsidization, and food and housing supports, we will ensure that every citizen of Massachusetts will be able to feed themselves, maintain a stable residential environment, and have access to high quality basic health care that they can afford.  And, in return, we will demand that every citizen of the Commonwealth contribute their labor from time to time to secure certain collective conditions of existence for themselves and their neighbors.

Introduction of a universal basic income source for the broader population of the Commonwealth further poses some important questions regarding the structure of labor markets in Massachusetts and the legal restrictions and requirements that we place upon the labor-capital relationship.  Notably, if all citizens in Massachusetts will be able to call upon a basic income and, contingent on need, housing, health insurance, and nutritional assistance, then would we need to continue to call upon employers to contribute to unemployment insurance pools?  Could we make unemployment insurance payments, as well as health insurance sponsorship, by private employers in Massachusetts a thing of the past?  More generally, if we actively engage in transferring significant ancillary elements of labor costs away from private employers and into the hands of the state, then we may generate particular elements of a labor cost advantage for entrepreneurs in Massachusetts moving forward, especially in particular, labor-intensive production processes.  Whether such cost advantages actually manifest themselves will depend on a wide range of market dynamics, shaping the capacities of entrepreneurs in the Commonwealth to compete in wider markets, but we are optimistic that our efforts to address labor markets will have positive effects in developing and sustaining an aggressively entrepreneurial environment in Massachusetts over time.  

Before concluding on this theme, we need to consider our support for alternative and, especially, democratizing innovations at labor market engagement.  To the extent that we create an economic environment in which our citizens will be guaranteed a basic income subject to periodic community service, we may provide a broader segment of our population with the time and a space of economic freedom to think about new types of entrepreneurial projects.  If we can nurture certain group collaborations, along these lines, to develop new cooperative enterprises, especially workers' cooperatives, in which the operations of firms embody an inclusive and democratic managerial approach, then we may not only inspire new entrepreneurial, market-oriented responses to local needs identified by forward-thinking agents, but we will also create new manifestations of democratic engagement in the lives of our citizens, departing from top-down capitalist managerial methodologies.  Manifestly, not all such projects could be expected to succeed or remain pristine cooperative-democratic experiments in the long term, but the economics of any successful market system is and must remain vibrant and open to wide varieties of entrepreneurial experiments, and, in Massachusetts, we are hopeful that at least some of the new entrepreneurial experiments that we will inspire will take democratic processes among their members seriously.   

Workers and the Right to Organize

For over a generation, federal governmental management of macroeconomic development in the United States has focused on supply side variables.  It has followed from a theoretic orthodoxy that assumes a linear development of the productive capacities and, hence, output quantities of private firms based on the regulation of savings/investment rates in relation to the depreciation of existing capital stock.  Such a theory, in turn, assumes that, given fixed rates of investment in new productive capacity, every output produced will be consumed.  In a macroeconomy organized along these lines, consumption demand has no independent relevance to the organization of production.  In effect, firms invest in new productive capacity for the sake of doing so without any conceptual linkage to the profitability of a productivity enhancing investment.  Approaching macroeconomics in this manner, policy makers in Congress and various Presidential administrations have accorded primacy to policies that place more financial resources into the hands of investors, especially wealthy ones, to expand their investments, with the hope that expanding incomes will "trickle down" to workers.  They have lowered the top marginal income tax rates and re-categorized incomes derived from capital gains to lower the effective rates of taxation on increases in the realized values of financial securities, sources of income preeminently enjoyed by the highest income groups.  

On the contrary, such groups of investors have been motivated by alternative, more multifaceted conceptions on the utility of capital investments.  They have moved their funds around, investing here and there, at home and abroad, wherever they can realize the best potential return on their funds, relative to risk, and minding the profitability of investments at diverse points along supply chains ultimately culminating in consumer goods and service industries.  In this regard, the wealthiest, highest income groups certainly have nurtured the spending of workers and lower income populations, more generally, but, since the 1970s, they have largely done so with strings attached, manifest through rates of interest on consumer financing, funded through the skewed earnings of the super wealthy.  In the US and in many other places across the Western industrialized economies, real incomes for the majority of working people have stagnated since the 1970s and consumer debt has, in the place of rising incomes, exploded.  Across the Western economies, we have maintained the vibrant, consumer-driven economics that emerged in the years after World War II as working people, organized within strong labor unions, demanded an increasing share of the their own increasing productivity.  However, having broken much of the presence of organized labor across much of private industry, especially in the US, capital has opened the door to income streams from lending to the same workers who can no longer afford to enjoy preponderant higher standards of living without going into debt.  Wealth has not trickled down in the form of higher wages and rising, stable rates of employment and labor force participation.  It has paid for corporate campaigns to de-certify collective bargaining units, for political campaigns to pass right to work laws and to achieve preferential treatment of capital gains in tax codes, and for private portfolio investments to finance enormous increases in credit card debt and to bankroll a housing bubble whose rupture threatened the solvency of large segments of the global financial community and left millions of erstwhile homeowners evicted from the foreclosed objects of their abortive participation in the American dream.  

In this context, we are at pains to emphasize that we are not enemies of capitalism per se, however it is conceptually defined.  The excesses that a deeply flawed model of Western macroeconomic development has nurtured constitute the sources of our concern, and the Great Recession of the late 2000s represents the most visceral expression of why a debt-oriented model of long term growth in aggregate consumption expenditures, in which the wealthiest of the wealthy get to extract interest from every instance in petty consumption of subsistence goods by the poorest of the poor, is utterly unsustainable.  On the contrary, we need to emerge from the illusion that the effects of every statutory or administrative manipulation of tax codes to favor the abjectly wealthy represent a natural and beneficial expression of the play of market forces on the aggregate distribution of incomes.  The partisan macroeconomic policy makers of the federal government have played a critical role in creating and sustaining the worst tendencies of early Twenty-first century capitalism, and we will commit to dismantling the sources of the dysfunctionalities they spawned.  As we have argued above, we will deal, in turn, with the question of taxation for both the federal government and for Massachusetts, but, here, we seek to address the necessity of labor organization, as a critical structural component to the balanced growth of sustainable consumption-driven, market-oriented macroeconomics.

From the initial passage of the federal National Labor Relations Act in 1935 through the early 1970s, labor organization helped to maintain a steady increase in labor compensation to parallel increases in labor productivity in the United States, notwithstanding the perpetuation of geographic holes in organizational rights created by the passage of right to work laws in a broad swath of states.  In turn, as workers maintained a relatively steady share of national income as compensation, the US maintained relatively steady, if increasingly modest, rates of economic growth, driven, in large part, by the expanding consumption expenditures of a stable middle income strata.  Since the 1970s, however, as industry became more aggressively arrayed against organized labor and federal policy makers enabled the wealthiest strata of the population to exploit alternative investment strategies, both to shield themselves from taxation and to counter the strength of organized labor, the labor share of national income fell into decline, from nearly seventy percent of national income in the 1960s to less than fifty-five percent today.  

The transformation of private industry's engagement with organized labor since the 1970s and the ensuing stagnation of real incomes for working people happened for a complex set of reasons.  In certain areas of the broader US national macroeconomy, labor law worked to preserve a general animus against labor organization by economic elites, and the continuity of a macroeconomic environment in which certain corners of the country remained relatively hostile toward unions created opportunities for capital to exploit differentials in compensatory rates.  The Sun Belt macroeconomies developed aggressively in the post-War period, in part, because state governments in the South and Southwest passed right to work laws that made labor organization more difficult and sustained pervasively lower wages.  More labor intensive manufacturing industries, especially, began to relocate from the heavily unionized Rust Belt states to the Sun Belt and, as time passed, to Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and other macroeconomic environments where they could continue to enjoy perpetually lower labor costs per unit of output.  With freer trade and freer capital mobility, the cost of consumer goods in the US could remain stable or decrease over time, even as the production of wider ranges of goods moved abroad, while the incomes derived from such processes became more acutely concentrated on the higher end of the income scale.  Simultaneously, an entire industry developed to exploit legal loopholes and procedural and administrative hurdles in collective bargaining rights to enable employers to keep unions out or to de-certify bargaining units in order to push already certified unions out of workplaces.  As a result, the proportion of unionized workers in most state level private work forces has been pushed below ten percent of employed wage workers.  

It is our contention here that any image of long term sustainability in consumer-driven capitalist economic development has to include mechanisms that will promote a more defuse and proportional distribution of incomes across divergent strata of a macroeconomic system through the socially regulated operation of markets.  The continuation of a broadly skewed developmental model that privileges consumer debt over greater income equality cannot realize such ends.  Conversely, the presence of a vibrant legal institution of collective bargaining by workers can help to promote greater equalization of incomes while simultaneously providing workers with more fulfilling engagement, alongside management, in the operations of private, market-oriented, competitive enterprise toward positive ends.  To these ends, we, as a party, intend to support measures to increase the scale of private sector unionization in Massachusetts over time.  

To begin, we reiterate our intention to deprive the federal government of any prospective role in the regulation of our state macroeconomies, in general, and of our labor markets, in particular.  The National Labor Relations Act and its administrative apparatus, configured on the operations and rulings of the National Labor Relations Board, will be scrapped, root and stem.  We will reconfigure every element of labor law concerning the organizational rights of working people within this Commonwealth to suit the needs and interests of Massachusetts workers against the needs of an evolving labor market for a vibrant, entrepreneurial, market-oriented, globally-focused macroeconomic system.   Every non-managerial public and private employee in the Commonwealth will be entitled to join a labor organization of their choice for the purposes of collective bargaining or to refrain from doing so, even when employees in their workplace are covered under the legal representation of a particular labor organization.  Employers will be barred from either harassing or discharging any employee exclusively because of involvement in a labor organization, and, under circumstances where an employee can legally prove discharge by an employer for involvement in a labor organization, they will be entitled to be reinstated with remuneration for foregone earnings.  In place of enforcement of collective bargaining rights through the agency of the federal NLRB, we will expand the mission of the Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations (DLR) to include certification and enforcement of collective bargaining rights for all public and private sector employees in the Commonwealth. We will, further, devote particular attention to the specific administrative hurdles evident in the NLRA structure and, in particular, to those elements introduced by the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947 (i.e. the Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA).  Neither the closed shop nor the union shop may become laws of the land for Massachusetts workers, but we will mandate that all workers employed in Massachusetts workplaces under a collective bargaining agreements be compelled to pay agency fees for the privilege of enjoying the collective bargaining services of the certified bargaining agent of the workplace, notwithstanding any opinions on the rights of workers to abstain from payment of such fees currently enforced as a result of federal judicial opinions pursuant to NLRA.  Likewise, we may incorporate a prohibition on the organization of managerial staff for collective bargaining purposes, but, provided we do so, we also intend to codify in statutory language what we would construe in defining the term "management," uniformly for purposes of unionization and for enforcement of standards regarding administrative/workplace misconduct and, especially, sexual harassment by managerial staff relative to subordinate personnel.  There will be no reconstruction of legal loopholes to enable firms to skirt legal liability on the misconduct of workplace supervisors based on their particular roles within a structural hierarchy.  

Most importantly, we intend to transform the structure of the certification process for collective bargaining units and the capacity of collective bargaining units to be consolidated for the purposes of multi-site bargaining agreements.  Emphatically, we will enable certification of legal bargaining units under Massachusetts law by means of card-checking alone in place of representative elections.  We will set threshold levels of documented affirmation by a super-majority of eligible staff within a workplace and incorporate verification procedures to be performed by DLR investigators when and where employees have solicited a documented preference to organize for the purposes of collective bargaining.  In doing so, we are confident that we can both ensure that collective bargaining agents enjoy overwhelming support of the employees they represent and, on the other hand, that employers will be wholly deprived of any meaningful ability to harass or otherwise impede the efforts of workers to exercise their rights to organize, either directly or through the paid intervention of labor relations firms specialized in anti-union work.  We will also empower DLR to consolidate bargaining units, under the affirmative agreement of workers in each workplace, in industries where multi-site firms have heretofore eluded organization by means of organizational and work site fragmentation, supported by the administrative rigidities of NLRA.  In particular, we hope such a rationalization of administrative organization for collective bargaining units will support the organization of working people in a range of low wage service industries, like franchised fast food outlets and convenience stores.  If we are successful in propelling a growth of labor organization in low wage service industries, then we believe that our efforts will do more to increase the compensation rates for the least skilled workers of the Commonwealth than we could ever accomplish by incrementally tinkering with minimum wage rates.  And, most importantly, such increases in compensation would have been enacted, not from the top down by government, but by the collective actions of workers themselves.  Moreover, we will empower DLR to investigate circumstances in which it is unclear, both for purposes of organization and for the enforcement of other labor laws, whether particular workers, otherwise classified as independent contractors or franchisees of an overarching private business entity, should be reclassified as employees and allowed to exercise organizational and collective bargaining rights.  We will not allow creative employers in the gig economy to skirt compliance with the terms of labor law by perpetrating fallacies regarding the actual status of the workers who generate their wealth in exchange for parsimonious compensatory payments, often below hourly minimum wage standards. 

We will allow for the inclusion and legal enforcement of no-strike clauses in collective bargaining agreements as regulated by DLR, but we will circumscribe, by statutory clarification, the terms under which employers may claim that the actions of collective bargaining agents constitute an effective breach of contract under no-strike clauses.  In particular, we will not bar labor unions from engaging in sympathy strikes under circumstances where particular ancillary elements of a supply chain are not covered by no-strike agreements.  Nor will we bar labor unions from instigating secondary consumer boycotts.  We will bar unions from engaging in mass picketing that effectively disrupts the capacity of an employer to freely operate their business, but we will not bar unions from undertaking non-disruptive informational picketing or from engaging in other media-oriented tactics pursuant to larger strategy to support collective bargaining objectives.  

Nor will we bar employers from engaging in their own use of media to build support against the collective bargaining objectives of labor organizations.  Emphatically, the history of American labor and of labor organizing has been strewn with an abundance of episodes in which government has stacked the deck against working people, but we, similarly, cannot afford to stack the deck against firms to make their own best case to the general public and to their clientele on behalf of their own long term interests from the collective bargaining process.  If we are to truly develop a macroeconomic system that will broadly distribute the benefits of aggressive and free, market-oriented, globally-focused development, then we cannot disproportionately support the hand of workers and compel employers to accept a litany of government-sponsored hurdles to their operations without any consideration for the needs of owners, investors, and other stakeholders.  Such an approach would lead to the failure of our broader experiment in reconstruction of macroeconomic management in Massachusetts because we would stifle the willingness of entrepreneurs and investors to forge ahead with existing and new business projects.  

We will reserve a role for the Office of the Governor to issue temporary injunctions against union-initiated strikes or secondary boycotts and employer-initiated lock-outs when such actions may endanger public safety or otherwise cause significant and demonstrable harm to the broader functioning of the macroeconomy of the Commonwealth.  We will, likewise, enable the DLR, under very specific, circumscribed conditions, to order two parties in a labor dispute to enter into mandatory binding arbitration under its supervision.  To the extent that we are able to do so, we will embark on development of a rigorous statutory clarification of the sphere and limitations of managerial prerogatives that we would, as a state, consider outside of the boundaries of collective bargaining, taking both existing federal administrative and judicial rulings and the counterarguments of labor and employer organizations into account.  If it is, on the one hand, our desire to enable working people to pursue their own best interests through collective bargaining, then, on the other hand, we recognize that the overall functioning of our macroeconomy ultimately depends on maintenance of the peace between labor and capital.  In the end, we will only move forward, economically and socially, if all of our economic stakeholders mutually recognize their long term stakes in a more broadly equitable developmental model and the need to work together toward such ends.  Restoring the conditions for robust, consumer-driven economic growth in Massachusetts, without substantial recourse to consumer debt, will be a long road to tread, but we are hopeful that a deepening of the prevalence and institutional significance of collective bargaining by Massachusetts workers will contribute to moving us closer to our goals.   

Income and Wealth Inequality, Progressive Taxation, and Fiscal Restraint 

Once we have realized a threshold level of political power in the government of the Commonwealth, tax policy is going to occupy a great deal of our attention.  If community organizing will constitute the critical focus of this party as we rise to power, then everything that we mean to achieve through the development and actualization of fiscal policy when we are in power, in the course of a general devolution of federal power onto the states, will necessitate that we deal effectively with taxation in Massachusetts in order to ensure that the government of the Commonwealth has adequate fiscal resources in hand to do all of the things that we intend to do.  We will enact a universal basic income system for every citizen of the Commonwealth.  We will either continue to operate a subsidized marketplace for mandated universal purchasing of private health insurance policies or enact a tax-financed single-payer structure of health insurance coverage with active ameliorative state investment in private health care provider systems.  We will enact needs-based supports for individuals and households for nutrition and residential housing.  We will also invest in regional infrastructure enhancement, especially in upgrading of transportation infrastructures to address the need for collective ecological sustainability in response to climate change.  We will invest in the sustainability and durability of regional food systems.  We will upgrade public investments in primary, secondary, and higher education.  We will make palpable investments in the viability of private entrepreneurial projects, especially for groups traditionally locked out of sources of private speculative financing.  If we are to achieve any of these objectives, then we will need to upgrade our state tax system, and, concurrently, we will need to address the federal tax system in order to create the fiscal space to enable us to undertake our own fiscal initiatives.  In doing so, we will need to keep in mind how the existing federal tax structure has facilitated and shaped the evolution of income and wealth inequalities across the United States and throughout the sphere of global capitalism, and we will definitively address these issues as they exist in Massachusetts.  

To begin, we need to consider the federal tax structure as it currently exists.  As we have argued, the scale of the federal government and the weight of the federal fiscal footprint on the citizens of every state has grown excessively large relative to the range of collective needs that the federal government can or should palpably seek to address.  Over time, we intend to prune the duties of the federal government by means of the Article V amendment process, depriving Congress, the Office of the President, and the federal judiciary of almost any meaningful role in the articulation of domestic policy, except to resolve disputes between the states, to provide for a thorough but not excessive provision of continental defense, to maintain collective, interstate  physical and virtual infrastructures, and to respond to physical disasters and invest in the hardening of compromised geographies against the effects of climate change.  These limited needs will require fewer fiscal resources, and we will grant them to the federal government, in addition to the capacity to continue to issue and compensate the holders of new and already existing federal debt, as needed in order to achieve the more limited range of policy objectives embarked upon by Congress.  With our objective goal of trimming the fiscal footprint of the federal government in mind, we now need to turn specifically to the question of means.  How much will we be willing to hand the federal government in taxes from our citizens and by what vehicles (e.g. personal and corporate income taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes, import tariffs, etc.)?

In many corners of conservative opinion, the introduction of the federal income tax code through the Sixteenth Article of Amendment represents a critically wrong turn in the relationship between the federal government, the states, and the American citizenry, more generally.  We are not sufficiently disposed to scrap the federal income tax code outright, however.  It simply represents the most reliable and equitable basis for governmental financing.  Nor will we tolerate the introduction of value added or excise taxes on the federal level, beyond the continued utilization of federal taxes on gasoline, insofar as their effects are most likely to be borne disproportionately by those within the population least able to pay.  Our conception of fair taxation succinctly registers the degree to which any tax provision approximates a progressive methodology, taxing lower income populations at lower effective rates than higher income populations.  However, the history of the federal income tax code, from the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the present, articulates a process through which policy makers, with diverse conceptions on how to privilege macroeconomic growth, increasingly encumbered the law with loopholes, exemptions, credits, and deductions, collectively enabling the immensely wealthy and marginally savvy to pay minuscule effective tax rates on their incomes while working people with lower incomes have been afforded no shelter from the extraction of every last penny of taxable income by the tax man.  Emphatically, it is time, not for a slight reform of the income tax code, but for a wholesale gutting of every category of exemption and credit that has been utilized by the super wealthy to avoid paying their fair share of our collective burden.  In turn, we will simplify and reduce the overall scale of incomes extracted from all of our citizens through both federal personal and corporate income taxes.  

It is far too soon to specify exactly what rates of taxation we would be willing to tolerate for federal personal and corporate income taxes, but we can at least posit some conceivable ranges.  In particular, for personal income taxes, we hope to impose rates not exceeding ten percent on the highest margins and not exceeding five percent for ninety percent of individuals and households.  At present, individuals making less than $9,875 pay ten percent for every dollar of income to the federal government.  We would envision a base tax rate on individual (single filing status) incomes under $15,000 in current US dollars around three percent, with incomes between $15,001 and $150,000 to be taxed around five percent, between $150,001 and $250,000 around eight percent, and above $250,000 around ten percent, with no exemptions, credits, allowances, or exclusions for any individuals or households at any of the margins.  We will set tax margins at roughly double the income levels for each marginal rate transition for married partners filing jointly, in the interest of avoiding the recreation of marriage tax penalty.  Similarly, we will seek to scrap any legal distinction between ordinary incomes and realized capital gains, either long or short term.  In a political universe in which the federal government assumes an important role in the regulation of commerce at the level of every state, it makes sense to draw distinctions between the temporal terms in which capital assets are held by individuals prior to realization of their value in order to promote the improvement of physical assets or to otherwise stabilize ownership claims on capital income and to prevent rapid destabilizing transfers of ownership claims through day-trading of securities.  If we are determined to destroy such a political universe, however, then it makes no difference how remaining federal tax authorities differentiate between the terms under which capital assets are held.  The incomes derived from their sale will be taxed uniformly alongside all other elements of personal income at substantially lower rates to all individuals and households at all margins.  Finally, with regard to taxes on individuals and households, we will scrap the current structure of the federal estate tax.  We will seek to incorporate a substantially reduced exclusion on inherited income from $11.58 million down to $200,000 and tax inherited incomes at graduated rates from five percent up to a maximum of fifteen percent, with continued deductions for gifts and charitable contributions.  

We would envision a reduction of federal corporate tax rates from twenty-one percent to around seven or eight percent, with substantial qualification of deductions for depreciation allowances on capital assets in order to effectively reduce the range of allowable corporate tax deductions.  Emphatically, we hope to do everything in our power to ensure that every corporation in the US pays its fair share of taxes on domestic territorial income sources, whether the corporation is domestically owned or a pure foreign subsidiary.  On the other hand, as with taxes on personal incomes, our enunciation of federal corporate tax policy constitutes a single piece of a broader strategy to, firstly, maintain adequate revenues for the fiscal operation of a governmental jurisdiction toward which we will impose a substantially curtailed list of powers and responsibilities and to, secondarily, create a fiscal space through which we can decisively increase the powers and responsibilities of our sovereign state governments, in accordance with the particular set of missions that each state might choose to place in its hands.  There are no such things as abstractly "just" rates of taxation.  The best that we can do is to ensure that every echelon of governmental jurisdiction in the United States can meet its fiscal obligations without substantial recourse to recurring issuance of debt and, thus, to avoid the risk that governments might default on their obligations to bond holders.  In this regard, we certainly have to pay adequate attention to the scale of existing federal debt and to the role of US Treasury securities as global default safe investment instruments for millions of wealth portfolios.  They will remain so only to the extent that we remain trustworthy borrowers of the world's savings, and we will only do so if we maintain a system of federal taxes that will meet the fiscal needs that we establish for the federal government under our evolving, devolved structure of federalism.  As such, the numbers and tentative percentages advanced here mean very little outside of the broader contours of an argument in favor of shrinking the operational scale and the Constitutional responsibilities of the federal government.  We will invariably come to terms with what is actually possible only when we have assumed a level of power and influence at the federal level of government such that we are capable of enacting our vision.  

In Massachusetts, everything that we seek to achieve through fiscal policy will ultimately hinge on our ability to amend the constitution of the Commonwealth to enable us to enact a progressive income tax structure.  If we fail to do so, then our efforts to fill the vacuums that we will create through the retraction of the federal government will generate fiscal expenses that will fall too heavily on the larger population.  We would be vilified for massively increasing the tax burden for most of our citizens.  Rather, in creating a progressive structure, we might still modestly raise the overall tax burden on all of our citizens, but we would be able to mitigate such increases on a majority of our population in exchange for larger but manageable and reasonable increases on the super wealthy.  At the outset, we would likely seek to enforce personal income tax rate around twelve percent on individual (single filing status) incomes lower than $15,000 in current US dollars, around twenty percent on incomes from $15,001 to 50,000, around twenty-five percent for incomes from $50,001 to $80,000, thirty percent from $80,001 to 150,000, forty percent from $150,001 to $300,000, and fifty percent above $300,000.  As with federal personal income taxes, we would seek to set margins for marriage partners filing jointly at roughly double the level for individual/single filers in order to avoid creating a marriage tax penalty.  There will be no differentiation between realized capital gains and other sources of personal income.  We intend to substantially transform the calculation of Massachusetts estate taxes, enabling a matching exclusion on taxable estates up to $200,000 as we have posited for the federal estate tax, and taxing estates valued in excess of $200,000 from rates beginning at ten percent to at least fifty percent for estates in excess $10,000,000.  We would, likewise, seek to marginalize corporate income taxes modestly, with rates around ten percent for corporate gross incomes under $1,000,000 and around twenty percent for gross incomes above $1,000,000.  We will be sparing in the creation of loopholes, by virtue of the enactment of allowances, exemptions, deductions, and other administrative conditionalities in our tax code that might be exploited by the super wealthy and by their tax attorneys.  We recognize, in a certain sense, that tax provisions constitute an important mechanism to induce consumption and investment decisions by free private actors, and this reality may be too tempting to avoid.  We will be cognizant of how we construct the contours of our tax code and, to the maximum extent possible, we will not transform our income tax system into a backdoor to bankroll the wealthiest of our citizens from the hard earned contributions of the majority, even at the behest of marginally induced macroeconomic growth.    

In every circumstance here, our income transition points and marginal rates are tentative statements intended strictly to pose our larger argument regarding the need to reorganize fiscal revenue sources both for the federal government and for the government of the Commonwealth.  We do not know the extent to which we will succeed in trimming the expenditures and the tax revenues of the federal government, and, hence, we cannot definitively argue to what extent we will be able to increase the tax burden that we place on our own citizens in order to fill the gap in fiscal policy efficacy.  For that matter, we will need to remain cognizant of the reality that, as we retract the fiscal footprint of the federal government across all of the states, we will introduce a free space for competition between the states over differences in multifarious manifestations of tax policy.  Some states will doubtless attempt to make themselves into tax havens, with extremely low personal and corporate income tax rates and parsimonious expenditures on public services.  While we acknowledge that we are bound to struggle against such an adverse, competitive reality, we are simultaneously committed to the principle that Massachusetts will not engage in a race to the bottom, either in tax policy or in expenditures on public services.  We will wage a serious, sober, doctrinally progressive, and disciplined articulation of fiscal policy, geared, in conjunction with our public engagement with capital markets, to maintain stable and sustainable levels of macroeconomic growth over time, to maintain a broader range of public services that will enable every citizen of the Commonwealth to enjoy a decent minimal standard of living and to engage in a consumption-driven macroeconomic system, and to inhibit the growth of excessive public debt such that we will not bury future generations in a growing burden of bond repayments.  

Recognizing that the government of the Commonwealth is likely to require recourse to capital markets from time to time in order to cushion our fiscal budgetary allocations against cyclical fluctuations in tax revenues arising from, among other things, short term business cycle contours, we, again, are committed in principle to the creation of our own sovereign currency to better enable us to issue sovereign debt on our citizens' behalf.  To the extent that we do so, we must simultaneously recognize the limitations on our capacity to finance government spending through the issuance of public debt.  In the end, the value of our currency in international exchange will respond significantly to our own level of public indebtedness, relative to that of other state governments and of foreign governments.  If we borrow too heavily against reduced tax revenues, then we will be held to account through devaluation of our currency and price inflation across the macroeconomy of the Commonwealth, especially on imported goods.  Our firms and our consumers would be punished for the unrestrained profligacy of their government, and we cannot allow that to happen.  On the other hand, we need to recognize that a measured, disciplined regime of counter-cyclical fiscal policy can promote the stability of our macroeconomy against cyclical fluctuations in business activity and aggregate employment.  This means not only accessing capital markets from time to time, but acting in a disciplined manner to pay down accumulated debts during economic upswings and, further, building up reserve funds to cushion expanding levels of fiscal expenditures during recessionary periods so that we are not exclusively seeking recourse to capital markets in order to support the periodically enhanced needs of our citizens.  

The discussion advanced in this section has largely been limited to consideration of income taxes to the exclusion of alternative means of governmental financing through the tax system.  Conversely, we introduced the idea above, in discussing capital markets, of introducing a financial services tax that would likely fall overwhelmingly on the wealthiest segments of our citizenry.  In the broader spirit of progressive taxation, we would support such a type of value-added or sales or service/transactional tax because it would be borne by the most affluent of our tax payers to the exclusion of households that do not hold any portfolio investments.  Acknowledging this point, we would simultaneously seek to reduce or eliminate as much of the range of value-added or sales taxes currently exacted across the Commonwealth to the extent that such taxes fall most heavily on those households least able to bear the burden of their exaction.  We would seek to permanently remove or at least reduce taxes on a range of consumer discretionary products currently taxed by the Commonwealth.  We may consider how we might re-tailor the state automotive excise tax in order to reduce this tax especially on households that choose to purchase more energy efficient vehicles.  Emphatically, the manner and extent to which the government of the Commonwealth and those of all our municipalities continue to fund their activities through the tax system will change significantly over time, as we consider our ancillary objectives relative to the tax system and as we move to decisively reorient taxation in general toward our wealthiest households in order to reduce or, more minimally, to stabilize the burden demanded of a majority of our citizens in relation to our recognized public fiscal priorities.

We should briefly consider the institution of municipal property taxes across the Commonwealth and, in particular, the problem of Proposition Two and a Half.  In the end, we do not know the what extent to which the changes that we plan for the Commonwealth will increase the fiscal burden on our municipalities, especially those related to public primary and secondary district education and the maintenance of public safety and order.  We will outline below, to a certain extent, regulations that we intend to put in place against residential and commercial development in particular municipalities at the outer edges of metropolitan settlement around Boston, Worcester, and Springfield in order to maintain the undeveloped character of exurban land space.  In this regard, alone, our policies will clearly place stresses on the fiscal viability of at least some municipalities.  As such, the government of the Commonwealth would be compelled to increase aid to cities and towns as the principal vehicle to support increases in municipal expenditures not otherwise supported through local property tax rate increases subject to the annual and multi-year restrictions of Proposition Two and a Half.  With this in mind, local governments have, more recently, discovered a range of fiscal amelioratives to allow an increase in annual budget limits.  Some municipalities close to legally regulated gaming facilities have been authorized to receive social mitigation payments from casino operators, but the receipt of such payments has been substantially impacted by the uncertain profitability of the legally sanctioned casinos.  Alternatively, the legalization of retail cannabis sales for medicinal and recreational use has constituted a source for local tax revenues, mandated under community host agreements with cannabis retailers.  Finally, the government of the Commonwealth has extended the right to municipalities to enact local taxes on restaurant and hospitality services.  Given our manifest preference for progressive taxation, we would question the enduring efficacy of these amelioratives, especially those involving sales/transaction taxes on goods and services readily consumed by lower income populations.  It seems evident that we will have to comprehensively investigate how to shore up municipal budgets, in order to maximize the capacity of municipal governments for local control of public education and the restructuring of public safety.  At this time, we do not know whether property taxes will remain at the center of such a resolution or whether Proposition Two and a Half will have to go by the wayside if municipalities are to firmly exercise democratic self-governance outside of permanent fiscal constraint.  We will not support continued local taxation of the restaurant and hospitality industries or the retail cannabis industry, and the support that certain municipalities have received from the gaming industry has a strict and fixed temporal horizon that will inevitably be reached.  We will need alternative solutions for the municipalities, and they will need to be progressive.

           

Our primary concern in the articulation of taxing policy will remain the achievement of a proper fiscal balance as we realize our public policy objectives, inclusive of shoring up our social safety net.  We acknowledge that our taxing structure will not entirely achieve income or wealth equality, as some on the radical left would hope to achieve.  As we have been at pains to argue, we are not enemies of capitalism and its attendant inequalities.  Any economic system that seeks to incentivize entrepreneurial initiative by means of pecuniary incentives will doubtless generate differentiations of wealth and income as the most industrious, crafty, and fortunate actors within the economy take advantage of the opportunities afforded to them, even as many others seeking the same ends fail in their efforts.  The history of American capitalism has taught us that we cannot afford to excessively restrain the creation of substantial accumulations of wealth by creative and industrious minds who are willing to take risks.  Again, we do not know how the landscape of tax rates among individual states will situate itself as we begin the retraction of the federal government, but we do know that we must limit our own desires to level the economic playing field or to redistribute the excess rewards of our most successful residents beyond the immediate needs to fund our fiscal policy initiatives.  We will adequately fund our public primary and secondary schools, our public institutions of higher learning, our public interventions into health insurance coverage, our public efforts to secure nutritional aid for the most needy, our public efforts to secure decent housing for every resident of the Commonwealth, and our public efforts to distribute dividends to every citizen of the Commonwealth in exchange for an enhanced institution of public service, and those efforts will be fully funded in spite of our commitment to maintain a free space for every creative and entrepreneurial actor in the Commonwealth to bring their best, most marketable ideas to fruition in our open, free market space.  We will not execute tax policy in Massachusetts with an ingrained animus toward wealth.  We will, on the contrary, respect the talent and creativity that our entrepreneurs have demonstrated as we ask them to bear a burden proportional to the extent of their success in a macroeconomic structured largely of our collective creation.  We will give them an economic environment favorable to their success and, in return, we will ask them to bear a greater weight of the fiscal expense to support the needs of their neighbors.  In our view, progressive taxation epitomizes fair taxation.  We recognize that this will be too much to bear for many of our wealthiest citizens, but we will move forward, and if they leave our Commonwealth, we will act as circumstances require to ensure that their absence will not deter us from the success of our vision for the future of a free and democratically sovereign Massachusetts.            

Housing Markets and the Management of Space

Every citizen of this Commonwealth and, more broadly, every human being enjoys a basic right to shelter themselves from the elements and to lay their head daily on ground they can call home.  This right emanates from the compulsion of human need, and it defies the particularities of legal claims to the sanctity of private property.  Our own founders and the very luminaries of the classical liberal tradition recognized, themselves, that no claim to exclude shelter from those in need can stand against the the willful and self-defensive expropriation of space by human beings ravaged by cold or by other potentially lethal effects of exposure.  For our part, we are not defenders of the extra-legal expropriation of private property as living space by homeless squatters, but we must recognize that it is the responsibility of government, acting on the behalf of all its citizens, to ensure that every citizen has a home minimally suitable to their needs and to act, in this regard, to structure housing markets such that entrepreneurial initiative can be steered toward evolving needs for housing.  We, likewise, recognize that we cannot rely exclusively on the initiative of the private sector to construct and to offer sufficient quantities of residential space, either for purchase or rent, as the population of our Commonwealth evolves.  Furthermore, in regard to private development of housing stock, we need to fully consider how the real estate construction industry organizes its resources relative to the availability of land and the need for conservation and maintenance of land for alternative needs, including agricultural production.  Succinctly, we will embark on the development of a full-fledged regime to manage spatial development and use in Massachusetts to respond to the imperative of climate change, to facilitate the growth and sustainability of local food systems, to redevelop urban spaces in conformity with the needs of local populations, and to ensure that every resident of this Commonwealth can reside within a home that meets their needs, whether by ownership or by enforceable rental agreement.   

Like so many other components of our broader agenda for the Commonwealth, housing and regional planning policies will have to patiently await our coming to a threshold of political power in the Commonwealth and at the federal level, but until then we will organize our communities to begin to envision what a just, morally grounded, and socially concerned approach to housing might look like.  We will organize home owners, renters, households on the verge of eviction in the midst of long term COVID-19 induced unemployment, landlords struggling to pay their mortgages as their tenants struggle to make their rent, and the destitute homeless, squatting in unoccupied private properties, huddled into encampments in secluded spaces, and escaping exposure on scarce shelter beds in another New England winter.  And it will be our message that the prevailing model of the free American housing market is inadequate to the depth of human need that we confront in Massachusetts.  Even as we do our best to place band aids on scattered cases of households locked out of stable residency, we will plan for the future.

   

There are numerous components in our larger approach to housing policy that we need to roll out to specify what we have in mind.  First, in regard to housing markets and home construction, we need to consider the consolidation of capital, both for construction and for home purchases.  Private financial resources that find their way into housing markets invariably arrive there seeking at least a minimal positive rate of return on the investment.  Conversely, a relatively conservative rate of return in home construction and mortgage financing may be offset, at least in part, by the moderation of risk.  Private housing markets in the US over much of the Twentieth century worked reasonably well because capital was successfully assembled and channeled to ensure that large numbers of households could undertake home purchases and investors could obtain moderate, reliable rates of return at very low risk of loss.  For decades, up to the passage of the financial reform initiated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1996, mortgage backed securities containing bundles of conventional home mortgages conforming to agency standards constituted a bland, low return investment instrument, part and parcel to the portfolios of pension funds and other pools of low risk investment capital.  This pattern only changed because Congress, in its infinite wisdom, opted to open up mortgage markets to entirely new resources seeking much higher rates of return.  When the smoke from this wave of financial innovation and consolidation of investment and commercial banking capital pools cleared, the global financial system teetered on the brink of collapse and tens of thousands of new homeowners in the US found themselves foreclosed and evicted from their stake in the American dream.  The Great Recession of the late 2000s was forged in the ill founded experiment of expanding American home ownership by means of readjusting variable rate mortgages for households of traditionally higher risk of default.  

In Massachusetts, we need to learn and apply the lessons of housing markets and, especially, primary and secondary mortgage markets from the last century in the US.  Emphatically, not every household can or should be expected to own residential property.  We need to craft housing policy that responds to the reality that certain segments of our population will reside continuously in rental housing.  On the other hand, insofar as home ownership has a range of beneficial effects on the financial well being of households and on the broader macroeconomy, we need to craft policies that can continuously attract private capital into home construction and into secondary mortgage markets in such a way that, over time, more residents of the Commonwealth can readily afford to purchase real estate.  In this regard, we will have to organize a secondary mortgage market for the Commonwealth as a reservoir for private capital, capable of being injected into primary mortgage markets in order to enhance liquidity and slowly expand the proportion of our citizens who can purchase their own homes.  Simultaneously, we need to evaluate the supply side of housing markets and, more so, the process of home construction and renovation of existing housing stock.  Where are new houses being constructed?  What is the tentative price range on new housing stock?  How are these matters related to the zoning regulations and the property tax base of our municipalities, their expectations regarding state aid for cities and towns, and the range of downstream municipal expenditures on public services, especially public education and infrastructure?  In important ways, housing policy for the Commonwealth will have to address matters of multi-jurisdictional public finance every bit as much as they address the needs and interests of prospective home owners and of occupiers of rental housing.  

Before we get too far into the specifics of what we have in mind for housing policy in Massachusetts, we can outline with the details of what we intend to do with federal housing policy.  Centrally, if we have our way, then the federal government would, in no uncertain terms, have no role in the housing markets of any of the states or in the spatial and regional planning initiatives, including laws governing local zoning, developed in each of the states.  We recognize, conversely, that the federal government should continue to have a role in responding to acute climatological events and, consequently, in investing in the hardening of infrastructures and delineation of building construction standards in climate compromised geographies (e.g. in low-altitude seaboard regions and regions subject to extreme drought, wild fire risk, or perennial flooding).  In this regard, the states will continue to be obliged to discuss regional planning with remaining federal authorities, especially in FEMA, to the extent that our plans involve regions subject to climate risk.  In the case of Massachusetts, we will be compelled to negotiate with federal authorities over our intentions for construction of residential and commercial real estate and infrastructures in seaboard areas, especially on outboard shores of Cape Cod and around Buzzard's Bay and in seaboard areas on Boston Harbor, around Cape Ann, and around the mouth of Merrimack River up to the New Hampshire line.  If we intend to authorize a role for the federal government in planning and investing in response to the potential effects of climate change, then such negotiations will be inevitable, and they will be the least that we can do on the behalf of all our countrymen to ensure that our collective, interstate fiscal resources will not be wholly wasted if individual states authorize development of real estate and infrastructures in perilously compromised environments that will repeatedly absorb federal resources for disaster relief.  Invariably, it will become far more difficult for contractors to build luxury cottages just off the beach on the outboard shore of Cape Cod, on the Outer banks of the Carolinas, or in regions of California perennially ravaged by wildfires, with the expectation that FEMA will come around with federal monies to bail out homeowners who watch their dream homes destroyed by the vicious hand of nature.

Beyond our resolve to enshrine a permanent role for the federal government in disaster relief and preemptive ecological planning and investment, we will deprive the federal government of any further prospective role in housing markets and regional planning.  We will completely scrap the US Department of Housing and Urban Development as it currently exists, including, crucially, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).  The federal government will neither offer grants for housing construction nor will it sponsor home loans for first-time home buyers or for military veterans.  If undertaking such initiatives is important and worthwhile to the citizens of Massachusetts and to our broader goals regarding the progress of private home ownership in the Commonwealth, then we will take on those duties ourselves and fund them both through our tax system and through the accumulation of private funds through our own government-sponsored secondary market agents.  The Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) will be wound down.  It will cease to purchase FHA and VA mortgages from lenders (and new FHA and VA mortgage sponsorship will be discontinued) and begin a programmed liquidation of its assets, contingent on the assurance that the federal government will continue to guarantee returns on all mortgage backed securities issued by Ginnie Mae against risk of default of underlying mortgages.  When its balance sheets have been fully cleared, Ginnie Mae will be permanently closed for operation.  

To the extent that we intend to close Ginnie Mae, we need to offer further consideration on how we intend to approach the federal government-sponsored private secondary mortgage market agents (i.e. the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)), the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac).  The operation of these private corporations on an interstate level has been predicated on the existence of an implicit guarantee that the federal government would reimburse holders of agency-issued mortgage backed securities against the risk of default of underlying mortgages.  For most of the history of these corporations, they operated as a source of bland, low yield, low risk securities, backed by thoroughly vetted residential mortgages, issued by lenders adhering to strict underwriting standards established by the GSEs.  After the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1996, however, as the secondary mortgage markets in which they had formerly served as virtual monopsony purchasers opened up to entirely new sources of capital, seeking obscenely high rates of return in riskier, subprime mortgage assets, their private shareholders got greedy.  In competition with big Wall Street investment banks, they started buying up subprime and Alt-A mortgages and issuing multi-tranche securities that might obscure the risk for default of underlying assets, mixed in with their standard fare of safer mortgages conforming to underwriting standards.  As the rates of default of subprime home mortgages began accelerating in 2006, Fannie and Freddie were left with balance sheets replete with non-performing home loans, with no recourse but to plead for help from Congress at the behest of their desperate private shareholders.  Since 2008, both GSEs have continued to operate under direct government conservatorship through the Federal Housing Finance Agency, returning to rigorous underwriting standards for purchasing mortgages and issuing mortgage backed securities.  

It is clear to us that this situation cannot continue.  We do not want the federal government overseeing nominally private corporations engaged in elements of private financial markets facilitating areas of policy in which we are determined to eliminate any substantive federal role.  Moreover, if the development and operation of publicly regulated secondary mortgage markets is important to the maintenance of liquidity for primary mortgage issuers and the efficient operation of residential real estate markets, generally, then Massachusetts clearly needs a secondary mortgage market agency capable of raising private capital to purchase home mortgages from Massachusetts banks, credit unions, and other publicly authorized home mortgage lenders in conformity with rigorous underwriting standards and, subsequently, of issuing mortgage backed securities to both finance the purchase of additional home mortgages and to distribute modest returns to private investments in a stable housing market.  We are not convinced that the private structure of Fannie and Freddie, coupled with their implicit guarantee of federal government assistance, was sufficient to incentivize irresponsible behavior by their executives in the run up to the mortgage market collapse, but we are sufficiently confident that we can do better for the residents of the Commonwealth by setting up a collaborative public-private enterprise, closer to the model of Ginnie Mae than to that of Fannie or Freddie, to purchase strictly conforming primary market mortgages, partly through tax financing and partly through private lending, and rebundle them into bland, low yield, low risk mortgage securities to be marketed publicly as fixed-income instruments for retirement portfolios and insurance funds.  If we are successful in achieving these ends, then we will bid Fannie and Freddie a fond farewell as forlorn great ideas, forged by the New Deal and the Great Society but ultimately incompatible with a new conception of federalism and a reassertion of sovereignty by the states.

Any efforts that we make to develop a functioning secondary mortgage market through a public agency must recognize the role of secondary markets in creating and sustaining discrimination across housing markets and enforcing geographic patterns in housing investment and disinvestment.  Emphatically, the institutions in place in American housing markets over the second half of the Twentieth century made the red-lining of low-income, non-white urban communities possible, and we will not successfully address discrimination in housing markets and disinvestment in urban communities until we create institutional instruments capable of directing adequate funds toward target communities.  Secondary mortgage market agents can play a role in this regard to ensure that the primary mortgage issuers from which they assemble their portfolios direct adequate resources toward home buyers in disadvantaged areas, but we additionally must consider direct public investments in the construction of new and renovated housing stock in previously red-lined areas, both for purchase and for rent.  The broader process of integrating a wider range of lower-income households into the ranks of home buyers will, in this regard, be a long struggle.  As we have conceded, it was a mistake in the early 2000s to force an increase in public support for home buyers at the margins of default risk.  In certain respects, we acknowledge that increased financial support for lower-income households in previously red-lined areas by the government-sponsored secondary mortgage market agencies was a worthwhile endeavor.  However, these efforts were bound to fail because they were structured through primary mortgage issuers using variable interest rate mortgage instruments as a means for luring in households under conditions where the issuers knew perfectly well that the prospective home buyers would be incapable of affording their mortgage payments after their initial teaser interest rates readjusted.  When long term investments in home ownership by households at the margins of default risk are confronted with institutions shaped by the short term motivations of strip mine financial operators, seeking to build up enormous portfolios of home mortgages characterized by extreme levels of default risk to be bundled and sold off on secondary markets flush with new sources of private capital looking for big rates of return, the results are predictable, and the government-sponsored agencies should have avoided such investment pools altogether.  Reinvestment in home ownership by lower-income communities cannot succeed if it is founded on the get rich quick schemes of financial capitalists who do not take the broader virtues of a more socially expansive institution of home ownership seriously.  As we move forward to break down the boundaries constituted by red-lining, we are not going to rely exclusively or even primarily on the selfish motivations of private capital investors to push a process faster than it can readily be maintained through prudent underwriting of default risks.    

Finally, in concert with our larger efforts to reform the federal tax code, we will scrap mortgage interest rate deductions for federal income tax returns.  The federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 had created conditions under which an increasing number of households across the US might be less likely to claim such a deduction in lieu of accepting an enhanced standard deduction.  For this reason, the widespread elimination of mortgage interest deductions might be less consequential than it would have been in earlier periods.  More generally, our concern with the mortgage interest deduction, again, arises from the effects of a measure essentially intended as a permanent federal stimulus for suburban housing development.  Since at least the 1950s, the dual inducements of federally sponsored mortgage loans for, predominantly white, first-time buyers and military veterans and of federal mortgage interest income tax deductions helped to create and sustain white flight from the cities to suburban housing tracts ever farther afield.  As residential settlement patterns around most Northern cities adjusted to reflect the centrifugal push of federal housing policy, commerce and industry were propelled, in many instances, to follow the people.  The shopping malls sprouted, sounding the death knell of the downtown commercial districts.  Transportation networks for an automobile-focused society had to be upgraded at significant multi-jurisdictional fiscal expense to enable both radial and transverse commuting by populations now increasingly driven to the outer edges of metropolitan settlement.  Highway construction divided urban neighborhoods, fracturing existing communities and further promoting the internal decay of previously vibrant urban economies.  We will address all of these developments in greater detail, but it suffices to say that it will remain a critical goal of our efforts in restoring the sovereignty of Massachusetts and of all the states to dismantle the federal policy apparatus that made the rise of the suburbs in American life possible, and the federal mortgage interest tax deduction remains an important piece in the structure of this policy apparatus.  If we deem it necessary or efficacious to reenact such a tax deduction for the income tax code of the Commonwealth, then it will be very strictly circumscribed to meet the detailed policy goals that we have for development of housing and the management of space.  Emphatically, we aim to bring back the cities, to reverse the damage that post-World War II federal housing policy did to the fabric of urban life in our state.  

Secondary mortgage markets constitute an institutional lynch pin, holding in place the financial stability and vitality of housing markets, in general, from the initial stages in land acquisition and home construction through the sale of completed properties and ancillary investments in the redevelopment of existing housing stock and infrastructure.  If we are successful in generating a stable secondary mortgage market, then we can begin to assess how we intend to engage with all of the other elements in housing markets, including home construction both for purchase and to augment rental stock.  In particular, it will be a priority for us to augment the quantity and quality of affordable housing stock, both for purchase and for rent, in urban areas of the Commonwealth.  Rather than allow patterns of sprawl development, from inner ring suburbs to the exurbs, to continue unabated, we need to concentrate new housing into the cities and leave more rural space open, undeveloped, and free for uses other than residency.  In order to enforce such a prioritization of urban spatial development, we may need to expressly enact statutory limitations, line by line, on particular areas and in particular municipalities of the Commonwealth.  

Politically speaking, we are likely to encounter strong opposition when we do so.  No municipalities in Massachusetts or anywhere else like being earmarked for legal restrictions on economic development.  On the other hand, we cannot allow exurb municipalities throughout the Commonwealth to continue to attract substantial quantities of speculative home construction capital onto virgin land to feed excess supplies of high end housing stock beyond the aggregate needs of the market, in turn contributing to recurring boom and bust cycles in housing development and property valuations.  Similarly, we cannot support developments that place extraneous demands on infrastructure and public service provision for the same exurb municipalities.  In effect, we are watching communities on the outer edges of metropolitan settlement in Massachusetts attracting levels of new residents for whom they must offer an expanded range of public infrastructures and services that they cannot fiscally sustain with their available property tax bases, even with substantial expansions in taxable residential and commercial property.  Such incongruities invariably enhance demands for aid to cities and towns from the government of the Commonwealth.  If we are going to protect the fiscal viability of the Commonwealth as a whole over time, then we need to develop more efficient, more concentrated patterns of settlement from which we can begin to enjoy the benefits of scale economies in the provision of infrastructure and services by municipalities, and the surest way to do so is to place explicit statutory limitations on new residential, commercial, and infrastructure development in our exurbs.  Conversely, we will develop state funds for redevelopment of existing housing stock in the cities to support and crowd in private capital accumulation for home construction and redevelopment in areas of dense residential concentration.  And, as suggested, there may be a place for tax incentives, including geographically targeted mortgage interest deductions, to favor urban residential construction and renovation.  We will brandish heavy sticks but also offer carrots to the home construction industry for entrepreneurial compliance.  It will be a long struggle, but we will undo several generations of suburban sprawl and destruction of arable land in rural spaces for the construction of obscenely large, ornate high end residences to augment housing stock at price ranges in which there was already excess supply.  

As our cities enjoy greater quantities of capital investment in residential upgrading, we will need to be vigilant in ensuring that lower income residents are not wholly displaced from existing urban communities.  Our hope is that, by increasing the concentration of settlement in Massachusetts, we will also enhance the social diversity of geographically contiguous residential communities and, in concert with our other public policy initiatives, promote a deeper unity and solidarity among all our citizens.  If, by pushing whiter, higher income populations back into the cities over time, we simultaneously push lower income, black, and brown urban residents out of long existing residential communities, then we will have failed to achieve the diversity that our policies had intended to nurture.  Again, in this respect, we will need to evaluate the full range of available tools at our disposal to support enhanced demographic diversity in urban areas.  In particular, we may utilize a combination of mortgage interest and rental expense income tax deductions and outright subsidization of some proportion of improved housing as we move forward.  While we are not wholly enthusiastic about ideas like rent control, it may be the case that such initiatives play a role in certain discrete urban environments threatened with uncontrolled growth in rates for rental housing.  Over the long term, we are hopeful that well regulated housing markets, supported by new residential construction, will allow for a stabilization of housing costs in urban areas at affordable levels without excessive public subsidization.  As such, it will remain a struggle for us to avoid induced gentrification of the cities as we revitalize them, but we simultaneously realize that the success of our endeavors in this direction may be key to our larger political project for the Commonwealth.  

To some extent, we will continue to prosecute our efforts in the cities through community organizing.  Only by intently listening to the problems of the most marginalized populations of the Commonwealth can we craft solutions that will address their concerns and harmonize their needs with our larger policy goals.  Specifically, in regard to housing, we need to progressively document the presence of inadequacies in the quality of housing stock and domestic infrastructure, including water and sewage networks, electricity, natural gas, and broadband internet access.  Over time, our engagement with discrete urban residential communities can help us to articulate a broader plan on how to upgrade the quality of residential life among lower income populations across the Commonwealth, not simply through direct government investment, but through a combination of community organizing and local volunteer work, private capital investment, and targeted government support of local stakeholders, especially aspiring lower-income homeowners.  In particular, we will support the private organization of diverse alternative, collective experiments in home construction and cooperative residency, such as co-housing.  Similarly, our organizing efforts must address the basic issues underlying homelessness across the Commonwealth.  In this regard, we recognize the compelling nature of the argument that establishing stable residential occupancy for the homeless must come first and that peripheral issues structuring the inability of individuals to secure stable housing can be addressed subsequently.  

In concert with these efforts and with our broader reconsideration of law enforcement policies, moreover, we would hope to inspire the development and sustain a multiplicity of unarmed private community watch initiatives, with the proviso that such initiatives be active, broadly inclusive, and democratically organized and maintained at the behest of all community members, regardless of income, racial, or ethnic differences between neighbors.  The security of individual residential communities would, thus, represent a site for the collective investment of time by members within the community in lieu of increasing public investment in larger armed police forces.  If we are sufficiently attentive in assisting local communities to develop their own local unarmed security initiatives, both by assisting in the organization and training of community members and in the utilization of technologies (e.g. video surveillance in centralized spaces, especially in large residential structures), then we are simultaneously confident that such initiatives will not evolve into forms that impinge on the liberties of community members or enable individual communities to become socially balkanized spaces, categorically unwelcome to outsiders.  We will not see our cities degenerate into disparate collections of gated communities.  They will remain free spaces for free citizens, overseen in their day-to-day existence by actively engaged local community caretakers.   

In regard to home construction building codes, we will embark on our own efforts to craft a thoroughly researched and sensitively articulated set of codes for construction of residential, commercial, and industrial structures.  As such, we will pay particular heed to the construction codes developed periodically by the International Code Council and other relevant bodies, but, in the interest of our citizens and taking due consideration of the longer term effects of climate change on Massachusetts, we recognize that we cannot afford to accord excess credence on one-size-fits-all formulas for standards in building construction.  The sorts of changes to building construction standards that we might envision, relative to existing standards, certainly include provision for internal hardening of structures, better insulation in compromised environments, and more efficient mechanisms for the transmission and regulation of temperature/climate control, but we also want to include provision of such features as electrical vehicle chargers insofar as the latter will be critical to reduction of the Commonwealth's aggregate carbon footprint as we move forward.  Over time, we also envision provision for increased space for vegetation in urban environments.  Carbon neutral cities will be thoroughly green cities in the sense that they will afford a greater presence of vegetation capable of removing marginal quantities carbon emissions through cellular processes.  Across every residential community, incorporating due consideration of divergent levels of population density, we need to be open to consideration of revolutionary and avant garde conceptions of green development, even to the extent that we need to invest public fiscal resources to induce private contractors to press forward in the use of new materials, new design methodologies, and new accommodations with regional planning initiatives.  In particular, we are interested in the possibilities for combining industrially pre-fabricated modules as a means for not only accelerating the time-frame for realization of larger construction projects, controlling various aspects of environmental/ecological impacts, and reducing diverse elements of labor costs in construction.  For larger structures, especially in urban environments, we are enthusiastic about the possibilities for incorporating such technologies as mass timber in place of structural steel or composite polymer materials, and we will continue to evaluate trends in the development of new technologies and new ideas in architecture and structural engineering in order to ensure that the design codes of the Commonwealth evolve in relation to our own social and ecological needs and the technological boundaries of the possible. 

Considering the larger spatial organization of urban communities, in particular, we envision cities that will be preeminently walkable.  We aim to concentrate residential and commercial activities in close proximity such that urban residents will be more succinctly capable of stepping outside their doors in the morning, walking to work, and walking to sites for everyday purchases of goods and services without needing to travel over two to four miles per day and, hence, without ever needing to utilize motor vehicles.  Alternatively, as we will argue in the forthcoming section, we will plan the flow of transit in urban environments to crowd in residential and commercial development into transit corridors, enabling urban residents to utilize transit more actively to readily get from point A to B on an intra-urban level, either by means of buses or intra-urban/metropolitan rail.  Such conceptions on transit mobility will be multi-directional.  They will recognize the centrality of one or more critical points across urban space and orient transit flow radially in relation to such critical points, but they will also recognize the necessity of transverse commuting between peripheral spaces, perhaps incorporating multiple types of transit vehicles of divergent passenger capacities or limited forms of on-demand transit access.  We will also take a larger role for bicycle mobility seriously, continuing to investigate how we can make safe bicycle travel by an expanding portion of our urban populations both feasible and exceptionally desirable.  There will be more dedicated bicycle lanes on major thoroughfares and stand-alone bikeways, articulating well-defined bicycle commuting networks throughout our cities.  We additionally foresee that certain elements of public infrastructures for everyday use will need to be augmented.  Critically, simultaneously humane and hygienic urban spaces demand inclusive and ready access to public rest room/toilet facilities.  Over time, we will develop comprehensive plans to respond to such needs, either through direct public investment in infrastructures or through programs to incorporate and subsidize the maintenance of accessible and well advertised private facilities.  Our ideas on the organization of space in cities, in this respect, is tentative.  We do not envision the intentional uprooting of large sections of the already existing fabric of urban life in cities like Boston, Lowell, Worcester, or Springfield.  On the other hand, we will attempt to forge a master vision on how our cities should change over time in order to privilege intensive urbanism, as a preference for the symbiotic development of residential and commercial activities on a spatially concentrated urban form.  As such, we will accept what already exists in real geographic space with a commitment to frame our hopes for the ongoing evolution of urban life in Massachusetts around intensive urbanist principles.    

    

With regard to the divergent multiplicity of local zoning regulations present across the Commonwealth, we want to acknowledge the validity of local perspectives in governing the development of space in each municipality, principally as a function of the democratic process.  Critically, we have attempted to emphasize our commitment to the democratic process across a sovereign Commonwealth of Massachusetts as the foundation for everything that we hope to achieve as a party and, more broadly, as the critical ethos underlying our enhanced conception of citizenship.  Conversely, we also need to concede that, as we move forward, we will encounter significant and pernicious moments in which our broader goals for the Commonwealth conflict with strict fidelity to the democratic process across various communities.  Manifestly, zoning control will likely be one of those areas in which the will of the government of the Commonwealth, in our hands, may be brought to bear against the wishes of individual municipal governments and their elected leaders.  As we have argued, we will contravene the efforts of exurb municipal governments to pursue unrestrained residential and/or commercial development of virgin lands that might otherwise be reserved for agricultural use or for preservation of green space.  We will, likewise, establish mechanisms for challenging local municipal zoning controls when particular developmental projects have been explicitly authorized, if not financed, under the authority of the government of the Commonwealth.  Invariably, we will be compelled at various times to override local decision makers on zoning.  If our articulation of a broader policy on housing, supportive both of the expansion and improvement of available housing stock and of its progressive concentration in urban areas and away from the edges of metropolitan settlement, is to be incrementally and continuously brought to fruition, then we will inevitably come into political conflict with communities adversely affected by our policies.  In this regard, we hope that we will succeed in pursuing our goals, but we also recognize that the democratic process and transformations in the ideological predispositions of a majority of our citizens may militate against the realization of our best ideas.  In the end, this party will only succeed in achieving its goals if we can most persuasively argue in their favor to all of our citizens, and this will certainly be true of our approach to housing.   

Concluding this consideration of housing policy, we should offer some brief thoughts on the present manifestation of a housing crisis, structured in turn as an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The economic effects of the pandemic response, involving prolonged stay-at-home orders and acute restrictions on economic activity in the services sector and, notably, in the restaurant and hospitality industries, has made it extremely difficult for a large segment of the population of the Commonwealth to budget for its monthly housing expenses.  Households deprived of regular sources of income have been compelled to prioritize certain basic expenses above others, and households with inadequate health insurance coverage in which individuals have been infected with COVID-19 have witnessed their savings drained by medical expenses.  Such economic impacts are utterly unavoidable as multiple jurisdictions of government have been compelled to prioritize maintenance of public health over full fledged economic liberty.  In turn, we have seen moratoria on rental evictions and mortgage foreclosures enacted as short run amelioratives, and, insofar as we seek to maintain stable residency for every citizen in the Commonwealth, we support these initiatives.  Conversely, should we encounter such a short term macroeconomic shock in the future, we will need to learn from this moment to ask ourselves how we can respond better.  By implication, we are concerned about the broader cascading effects of the pandemic throughout housing markets and, beyond, into financial markets.  Moving forward, it may be propitious for us to build in statutory requirements in future mortgage contracts negotiated in the Commonwealth, especially for the purchase of rental properties, that will ensure that, should we encounter such a short run macroeconomic shock in the future, the government of the Commonwealth will be fully empowered to order mortgage lenders to extend forbearance of the terms of mortgage contracts at our discretion in order to cushion borrowers as we enact eviction moratoria.  Emphatically, we will not subject small landlords to the pressure of renegotiating their mortgage agreements with their lenders when their unemployed tenants cannot afford to pay all of their rent on a monthly basis.  We will provide our executive agents in the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development with adequate legal authority to regulate compliance with the terms of mortgage agreements to ensure that lenders receive every penny to which they are entitled from borrowers but under conditions that we will structure to ensure that no short term macroeconomic shock can ever produce another foreclosure crisis.  

Transportation and Communications Networks, Mass Transit, and Regional Economic Planning

Issues in transportation policy are complicated in a way that certain other policies that we have so far examined are not.  Admittedly, some greater proportion of the responsibilities for maintenance of transportation infrastructures will remain in the hands of the federal government.  Our citizens in Massachusetts will continue to travel across our state's boundaries and consume goods manufactured and/or shipped from entrepôts in other states.  Much of this travel and shipment of goods will occur by means of the interstate highway system, initially constructed under the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s.  The federal government's investment in interstate highway construction certainly served preeminently economic rationales, but it also served necessary purposes in national defense and public safety/disaster response planning.  However much we envision a federal government that will exert a much smaller role in domestic policy and, in particular, macroeconomic policy management, we, emphatically, take the federal government's role in maintaining our physical infrastructural connections to the other states, in responding to climatological catastrophes, and in providing for the common continental defense very seriously.  The interstate highway system, our interstate passenger and freight rail systems, our open aeronautical corridors, our oceanic seaways into ports like Boston, and our open telecommunications networks, all remain critical areas in which we will call forth an active role by the federal government, even as we enhance the Commonwealth's participation in the management of transportation and communications policy and planning.  Long term management of our interstate highways, our air terminals, and our seaport facilities will remain a subject of cooperation between federal authorities, the Massachusetts Highway Department, and the Massachusetts Port Authority.  

Many elements of the federal Department of Transportation will remain in place.  Certainly, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) will continue to have a viable and serious mission in a world in which fifty or more sovereign states concede the necessity of maintaining their collective investments in the infrastructures that connect us.  Congress will continue to appropriate funds to maintain public infrastructures in interstate highways, airports, and public interstate rail networks.  Similarly, we acknowledge the importance of uniform sets of rules for the operations of passenger and freight airlines and rail operators, in force across all of the states.  Should we, in turn, deem that such rules and standards are insufficiently rigorous in maintaining the safety and economy of operators within the Commonwealth, we can obviously move to expand upon such standards without diminishing them in any way.  Conversely, we would question the role of the federal government in investment and oversight of intrastate transit systems.  It is conceivable that metropolitan transit systems that incorporate areas under the jurisdiction of multiple state governments might stand to benefit from the presence of an overall federal regulator and overseer of transit systems.  On the other hand, our preference remains with the ideal of state sovereignty and mutual cooperation between sovereign state governments over shared infrastructure networks that can be meaningfully restricted to two or three distinct state government.  Notably, we have in mind the areas of operation of such transit networks as the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) in New York City or the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), but Massachusetts has its own interstate rail transit linkages with Rhode Island and Connecticut.  In these circumstances, there is an argument to be made for federal involvement, but the extent to which cooperation between state governments may realize effective management of shared infrastructure

networks, to the exclusion of federal mediation or direct control and oversight, cannot be ignored.  Finally, we acknowledge that the federal government will continue to have a role in maintaining highway, rail, and aviation safety and in investigating accidents on interstate networks.  The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and, perhaps, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will continue to have functional roles to play in a United States constituted through fifty or more sovereign state governments.  Even to the extent that certain aspects of transportation policy are overtaken by individual state governments, we would conceive of significant benefits to be had in enabling the federal government to continue to investigate safety in transportation processes and to collaborate with state governments in order to better facilitate safe operation in intrastate transportation networks.      

To the extent that we anticipate the continued presence of a federal role in transportation and communications investment, we must maintain ultimate authority in planning and reshaping transportation and communications within the Commonwealth.  In particular, we need to develop a long term plan to upgrade inter-urban transit, especially by high-speed rail.  Acknowledging the likelihood of substantial infrastructure investments required for the incorporation of technologies like mag-lev (magnetic levitation), high speed rail technologies to be employed in Massachusetts may continue to employ conventional rail for the long term and undertake upgrading of conventional rail networks to ensure that passenger and freight rail traffic, in multiple directions, can be facilitated on a regular basis.  We would envision the extension of separate northern and southern east-west high-speed rail corridors, one leading from Worcester to Palmer, Springfield, and Pittsfield and the other from Fitchburg to Orange, Greenfield, and North Adams, with a further extension leading onto Albany, New York.  If we could realize such investments in our passenger rail infrastructures, allowing for regular, daily transit between Boston's North and South Stations and the Berkshires in less than one hundred minutes, then we would effectively stretch out the margins of settlement within the Commonwealth along our radial transit corridors.  Living expenses within the Boston metropolitan region could stabilize or even undergo a mild reduction, while peripheral cities in Worcester, Franklin, Hampden, and Hampshire counties might experience a slight increase in demand for housing and services as the metropolitan region experiences a substantial and sustainable outflow of population.  A demographic shift emanating from enhanced transit capacities could stimulate macroeconomic growth for municipalities outside the interstate-495 corridor and yield modest cost of living reductions for populations remaining within the immediate Boston metropolitan region.  To the extent possible, further enhancements of rail transit capacities and incorporation of high-speed technologies across the network of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) commuter rail system, expressly directed toward Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Bristol, and Plymouth counties, would stand to deepen these effects and promote broadly diffusive macroeconomic development across the geographic space of the Commonwealth.  

All too evident questions remain in articulating a broader inter-regional developmental strategy for the Commonwealth around interurban transit enhancements.  Specifically, if we make it easier and faster for peripheral populations to transit into Boston on a daily basis, then how will we give such populations a reason to stay in their immediate locales and support the growth of commerce, industry, and cultural production in peripheral communities?  Part of the answer to this question already exists in place.  We already have vibrant commercial, industrial, and cultural resources at diverse places outside of metropolitan Boston.  Insofar as broader elements and sources of demand for resituating populations outside of metropolitan Boston already exist, we need to further consider what we need to do in order to make transit the critical mechanism for daily movements of populations across the Commonwealth.  In particular, assuming we succeed in establishing high-speed radial rail transit into Boston at a select number of privileged stations, how do we maximize the accessibility of these stations to proximate areas, especially by means of transit?  We will certainly have to address the conditions of the regional transit authorities (RTAs) in Central, Western, and Southeastern Massachusetts and in the Merrimack Valley and on the North and South shores, increase their passenger capacities and undertake upgrading of vehicles (especially full electrification of buses), extend and regularize their hours of operation, and orient these operations toward "feeder" sites with ready availability of automobile parking, facilitating large scale "park and ride" usage.  As suggested, much of what we envision here would be served by automotive (i.e. bus) technologies, although there may be some role for transverse commuting via rail in the Pioneer Valley, bisecting Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties, in turn, facilitating connections with the economies of Southern Vermont and Central Connecticut.  We may also need to make substantial recourse to community organizing strategies built around car pooling and development of more extensive and entrepreneurial ride-sharing operations.  Finally, especially as we begin to conceive of developmental strategies for new urban housing and commerce in the peripheral regions, we will need to consider how we can crowd the development of higher density construction projects along transit corridors, both for high-speed rail and for feeder transit pathways.  Again, our imagery of intensive urbanism privileges such a crowding in of development around transit corridors in our cities.  In outlying areas, however, we need to work in such conceptions in relation to suburban areas linked along higher density transit corridors alternately with lower density transit routes and ready capacities of automobile parking for park-and-ride.  The more successful we are in privileging transit as the primary means of getting from point A to B for most residents of the Commonwealth, the more we will succeed in limiting the growth or decreasing the overall carbon footprint of Massachusetts derived specifically from individual automotive commuting.  It should be fairly evident, in this regard, that this will not be an easy task.  It will take us decades to put all of the elements hinted at in this discussion into place, but, minimally, we have an idea of where we need to take transit in the Commonwealth, as a single element in a broader macroeconomic developmental and ecological sustainability strategy, and, given a sufficient degree of sovereign fiscal independence, we can build over time, with discipline, to realize our goals.          

With regard to the transshipment of freight and management of industrial supply chains, emanating from or terminating in Massachusetts, numerous considerations come to mind on how we can maintain or expand the flow of producer and consumer goods entering the Commonwealth for final use, for further processing, and for shipment to other corners of New England.  Given our central location in the New England states, our facilities may expect to remain key elements in the flow of materiale, but we will have to actively invest in the maintenance and expansion of capacities for these facilities.  Specifically, we are encouraged by current efforts by the Massachusetts Port Authority in cooperation with the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge deeper and wider shipping channels approaching the Conley Container Terminal in Boston, and we are further mindful of the necessity of ongoing expansions to the terminal, incorporating new rubber tyred gantry (RTG) cranes and expanding the numbers of truck gates for more rapid on-loading and off-loading of container traffic, as well as integration of a dedicated roadway for freight traffic emerging from the terminal.  Conversely, we hope to investigate the possibilities for rail linkages with the Conley Terminal.  These speculations may not prove fruitful or financially/fiscally viable, in view of the terminal's remote location on the South Boston peninsula, but if we were successful in linking the terminal to interior freight rail networks, we might facilitate a vast increase in the quantity of container traffic transshipped through Boston, especially through international commerce.  Likewise, we will need to collaborate with the operators of our freight rail terminal facilities, in particular the container facility operated by CSX in Worcester, in order to ensure that we can continue to efficiently move an expanding quantity of freight via rail networks to all corners of the Commonwealth and across northern and southern New England.  Finally, we need to actively engage in expansion of air freight capacities via Boston-Logan International Airport, Hanscom Field in Bedford, Worcester Regional Airport, and the civilian air facility at Westover Metropolitan Airport in Chicopee.  We should also investigate the potential for expanding the scale of the Pittsfield Regional Airport to accommodate a modest capacity for air freight processing in the Berkshires.  Again, these initial speculations on commercial and industrial traffic may not bear fruit in the future, and, more pointedly, as we develop a more robust conception on how our macroeconomy needs to evolve in relation to climate change, we may incorporate a more modest and concentrated imagery on commercial traffic from outside of Massachusetts, but we seek to advance these conceptions as a starting point to recognize that trade in goods from outside of the Commonwealth is going to remain important for us, and we will work to ensure that our firms can continue to aggressively engage with the rest of the global economy.

With regard to communications media, inclusive of wired and wireless telephone, broadband internet, cable television, and radio and broadcast television media, we would gladly accept our full sovereign right to undertake regulation of communications utilized by our citizens, but the complexities involved here and the potential for spillage of jurisdictional claims across state lines makes all of this too murky for any individual state to exercise full sovereignty over mass communications.  Invariably, and sadly, we are left to concede that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will have to remain in existence and will continue to work in the interest of citizens from every state.  Manifestly, this is a problem to the extent that mass communications are a ubiquitous element in the everyday lives of every citizen in every state, and, therefore, the politics of mass communications will continue to exert an acrimonious effect on partisan struggle at the federal level.  In this regard, we will certainly wander into the fray in the lingering struggle over net neutrality and, thus, over the classification of internet service providers (ISPs) as information service producers or as common carriers for purposes of the Communications Act of 1934.  If our own sovereign regulation of ISPs cannot be meaningfully achieved in the course of the broader complexities involved in the operations of internet communications and transmission of data on nation-wide if not globally-scaled networks, then we will stand by the principle that internet access is a fundamental element in the everyday lives of every American and in the operations of American enterprise, that services providing internet access are public utilities, and, therefore, that we would support the regulation of ISPs by FCC as common carriers, subject to regulation to ensure non-discrimination of users, free access to all lawfully created and uploaded internet material, and transparent management of network policies by ISPs.  We acknowledge, in this regard, that regulation of ISPs will have a dampening effect on entrepreneurial initiative in the introduction of new technologies and new subscriber features by ISPs, but, on the contrary, we regard the management of access to the internet by individuals and firms as a critical subject against which a stable environment, privileging free access, transparent ISP policies, and non-discrimination across all users is essential.  We are willing to sacrifice robust entrepreneurial initiative by ISPs to maintain stable and open access to the internet.  

Furthermore, to the extent that we are able to carve out spaces in the management of internet and or communications network operations affecting our citizens, we will actively engage in our own initiatives through the government of the Commonwealth.  Emphatically, we will work with private investors and community organizations to extend infrastructure for broadband internet access to every corner of the Commonwealth.  In tandem with a commitment to net neutrality on the part of the FCC at the federal level, we intend to ensure that the internet remains a free space for lawful negotiation and execution of commerce, for interpersonal communication, and for sharing ideas in the sphere of intellectuals, amateur, academic, and professional.  We will steadfastly enforce legal prohibitions on illicit content, including child pornography and activities related to human trafficking and marketing of illicit merchandise.  Similarly, we will be mindful of efforts by parties outside of Massachusetts to steal data from our firms and government agencies or to appropriate personal information from our citizens.  We intend to outline more of the details on how we envision our future engagements in electronic intelligence and counterintelligence, but we fully intend to assemble the capabilities to strike out against foreign parties that attack our citizens and our organizational entities through their online activities, and we will punish such perpetrators.   

Finally, we must consider the transportation networks in place in Massachusetts for electrical energy and for transmission of oil and other hydrocarbons, most notably natural gas.  Regulation of much of the existing electrical grid within Massachusetts, from sites of power generation to individual homes, businesses, and government facilities, remains and should remain within the hands of the government of the Commonwealth through the agency of the Department of Public Utilities and under the direct management of our public utility operators, augmented for day-to-day macro-level management of electrical consumption loads across the New England region through ISO New England.  We are content to continue to participate within wider regional wholesale markets, managed through the ISOs, for the generation and distribution of electricity.  We, further, recognize that the decoupling of power generation and transmission has yielded certain savings to rate payers and broader systemic efficiencies both as a function of increased market competition between power generators.  Conversely, we also recognize that our electrical grid will have to continue to evolve into the future, especially in relation to our efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.  We will certainly continue to move away from fossil fuel-based generation and toward more green power generation.  We will continue to support the development of solar, wind, hydro, tidal, and, perhaps, next generation nuclear/fusion energy generation and battery storage capacities.  In addition, we need to consider our grid structure as it currently exists, principally as a function of sustainability and durability, both against the effects of climate change and the potential for foreign attacks on our energy transmission structures.  We, specifically, seek to investigate the potential for multiplication of redundant grid structures, both on a macro and micro level, oriented both toward alternating and direct current.  Would the creation of multiplicities of direct current micro-grids, incorporating diverse green energy generation sites with transmission of much shorter distances, perhaps limiting the range of power generation, transmission, and  storage to individual neighborhoods, tend to make our capacity for production, transfer, and consumption of energy more durable and secure than at present?  This concern will certainly occupy us in the future.  On the opposite end, how can we incorporate new green energy sources outside of the Commonwealth into our existing macro-grid to further arrest cost expansions and maintain adequate energy supplies for the immediate future?  At present, numerous plans to incorporate hydro-electric energy generated in Québec have been proposed, but their realization has been impeded by opposition from other New England states through which high voltage transmission lines would have to pass.  We have no doubt that new, large scale sustainable generation sources outside of Massachusetts will continue to open up in the future.  We should continue to pursue such initiatives to the extent that they can be brought to fruition under further collaboration with our neighbors in order to mitigate any negative effects from the construction of transmission networks across their territories.  

Consideration of interstate and international transfers of electrical energy invariably brings us to the problem of federal control and oversight in energy policy.  Specifically, as we transition to a Constitutional framework of enhanced state sovereignty, how will the federal role in energy change?  As we have argued, we would envision a continued federal role in the maintenance of interstate infrastructures, including those involved in the transmission of energy and of fuel sources.  Presently, in Massachusetts, we house a limited range of interstate pipeline infrastructures for gasoline and natural gas, and we will continue to work with the federal government to ensure that such infrastructures will be maintained into the future or dismantled as their need diminishes.  We certainly envision a continued role over time for the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) of the Department of Transportation.  Conversely, we need to consider the roles played by a range of different administrations within the US Department of Energy as they relate to the planning, construction, and maintenance of interstate pipeline and other energy infrastructure implements.  Most emphatically, is there a continued role to be played by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)?  Acknowledging that our authorities on public utilities must remain the final authority on planning and development of pipeline infrastructures in Massachusetts, do we need a federal agency to coordinate projects involving linkages between multiple sovereign states, or, conversely, can we eliminate such direct federal involvement and substitute direct cooperation between state governmental authorities to authorize and oversee private investments in the the interstate pipeline grid?  

We are convinced that investments in interstate energy infrastructures are better left to cooperation between individual state governments, insofar as such infrastructures implicate larger state policies regarding mitigation of climate change, contested, in turn, by the very corporate energy producers in whose interest federal authorities often seek to act.  We cannot have federal administrations overseeing projects to transmit diverse hydrocarbons, like bitumen and hydraulically fractured (fracked) natural gas, across state lines against our wishes and, more importantly, against our initiatives to arrest climate change.  If energy producers are forced to negotiate with a range of independent and sovereign state governments to achieve their objectives to transmit fuels across state lines, then they will be compelled to exercise extreme deliberation and caution in their planning and to make their best possible cases for the necessity of their plans for particular, very substantial capital investments.  For these reasons, we support the elimination of FERC and the full transference of authority for authorization and regulation of pipeline development and ongoing operations by private energy producers to each individual state government through which pipelines must pass.  Additionally, we would extend to sovereign first nations, against which territorial acquisitions for pipeline construction have been advanced, full authority to approve or to reject both the purchase of lands and the development of infrastructure projects traversing their territorial jurisdictions.  We acknowledge, in this respect, that such a multiplication of authorities governing infrastructure development will incite substantial uncertainty among, in particular, fossil fuel producers.  On the contrary, if such uncertainties dampen the enthusiasm of fossil fuel producers toward new infrastructure projects, particularly those destined to carry substances as toxic and ecologically devastating as bitumen, with substantial up-front refining costs demanding the most efficient, low-cost means of transmission from production to transshipment or consumption sites in order to secure the most minimal rates of profit for producers, then our efforts to install procedural roadblocks for fossil fuel producers will have, in all likelihood, prevented the introduction of new, otherwise cost-prohibitive fossil fuel reserves onto the global marketplace, benefiting every human being across the world. 

       

Food Systems: Creating Flexible and Resilient Structures to Sustain Basic Needs

It is imperative that we continuously ensure that our population has ready access to adequate food sources, both via local production and commerce with regions outside of the Commonwealth.  Most of our residents tend to take the reliability of food systems for granted if they consider them at all.  For generations, we, in common with most Americans, have come to expect supermarket shelves abundant with fresh produce, fresh or frozen and processed meats and seafood, dairy products, baked goods, and dry and canned or bottled goods.  We have, similarly, confronted myriad options across subsets of the restaurant industry, from fast food through five-star gourmet and farm-to-table dining.  At the cross-section of all these diverse veins of potential dietary sources, afforded through the bounty of free, entrepreneurial energy and risk-taking by multinational  corporate firms and small operators of roadside farm stands and everyone in between, we have an imperfectly integrated macro-level food system, enabling tens of millions of Americans to intake at least two thousand calories of sustenance per day.  We produce momentous quantities of food and, subsequently and tragically, waste obscene and unconscionable quantities.  In the process, we also generate quantities of food packaging waste that, in turn, assemble mountains of plastic and rotting fruits and vegetables in landfill spaces.  And, for all the dietary options and choices that the many subsets of the agricultural and food service industries advance before us for consideration, the larger population of the United States has increasingly experienced affliction from a range of health conditions, from obesity to various environmentally-responsive cancers, related intimately to dietary consumption patterns.  In a purely liberal world, where the politics of food limits itself strictly to regulation of sanitary conditions in food production and explicit prohibition of transparently toxic substances under otherwise free markets, the diverse sets of concerns implicated in this initial portrait of food production and consumption might appear beyond the boundaries of state regulation.  We, however, have an obligation to re-envision many aspects of American life that previous generations have otherwise taken as normal.  In our Commonwealth, we, of this party, will intentionally embark on the politics of food and on regulation of agricultural and food service markets in ways that have not heretofore been imagined in the United States, with the purpose of ensuring that no citizen in Massachusetts will ever experience malnutrition, that we might mitigate the effects of dietary-driven afflictions on the health of our citizens and, especially, on our children, and that we might reduce the deeper carbon footprint that agriculture and food services, both inside Massachusetts and in regions with whom we are linked through commerce, have imparted on the planet.    

Before we outline our conceptions regarding food systems policies for Massachusetts, we need to consider the federal apparatus that we intend to dismantle, specifically those of the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration in the US Department of Health and Human Services.  We will seek to dismantle all agencies of the US Department of Agriculture as it currently exists.  In particular, we sympathize with the missions of the farm service agencies, like the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC), and the Natural Resource Conservation Service.  They have performed important functions in supporting and stabilizing agricultural production and in enhancing liquidity for agricultural producers for whom investment in particular harvest of crops introduces innate uncertainties.  They have also facilitated the dissemination of technical and financial assistance for industries that manifest a significant role in impacting the productive efficiency and sustainability of the soil and hydrological assets.  It is evident to us that any state that derives significant shares of its gross economic output from its agricultural producers should actively undertake such functions and that such states would benefit from collaborations with similar states in order to distribute the fiscal expense of maintaining functions like crop insurance that are apt to increase in cost over time with the effects of climate change.  However, we are adamant in our determination that the federal government has no business engaging in such economic functions that are apt to impose significant fiscal costs on certain states to the nearly exclusive benefit of producers in other states.  If we, in Massachusetts, decide to support our producers in dairy or in fruit production, industries that constitute a relatively small share of the gross economic outputs of the Commonwealth, then we will be faced with a relatively small and manageable fiscal burden relative to what our citizens currently contribute in the aggregate, through the federal budgetary process, to support corporate corn and wheat producers in Iowa or Kansas.  Agricultural policymakers in the future sovereign state governments of these states should, themselves, contemplate how they can ensure that their own agricultural producers, both large and small, enjoy adequate liquidity to invest in each subsequent harvest so that every local downstream beneficiary of their enormous agricultural sectors do not suffer a macroeconomic crisis every time a river system floods or a prolonged drought lays waste to this year's corn harvest.  And to all of our conservative countrymen in the Heartland who might bemoan our refusal to allow the federal government to bankroll your corporate farmers, we would remind you, as you have so often reminded us, that every penny of federal funding introduces the intrusive hands of Washington bureaucrats and Harvard or Stanford trained scientists who would tell you how to manage your state governments and how best to help your farmers weather this or that aspect of climate change, depriving you of your autonomy and undermining your own fiscal self-sufficiency.  

We will also scrap the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) and all its attendant programs, including the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly "Food Stamps"), the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), and the Special Nutritional Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).  In this regard, we adamantly support the underlying purpose of these programs and we will elaborate what we think needs to replace them to secure adequate nutritional needs of the lower-income populations of the Commonwealth, but we are likewise adamant that the federal government has no business involving itself in policies for the provision of nutritional assistance to citizens of  individual sovereign states.  Moreover, we will not allow the dietary needs of our low income populations to be treated like a political football by conservative politicians from places like Mississippi and Wyoming, eager to drag out recipients of food stamps to label them as dependent abusers of federal largess who should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps or otherwise be subjected to work requirements in exchange for accepting surplus quantities of institutional cheese.  We are certain that the home states of such politicians will fair much better in constructing their own poverty relief initiatives, with much stricter acceptance guidelines and far more parsimonious benefits, in turn, reassuring their conservative electorates that the poor will be adequately shamed for the crime of being disadvantaged by the shifting winds of capitalism.  For our part, we will seek to ensure that this Commonwealth approaches its poorest citizens, in need of nutritional assistance, in a spirit of solidarity, because when even one of us suffers material inadequacies that impact our quality of life it is a blemish on our collective well being and evidence of a broader failure of community.  We will provide help and, in return, we will ask from our poor the same that we ask of every citizen, that they contribute their labor and their skills from time to time for the collective well being of their communities when we ask them for their help.

With regard to the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), we are faced with an evident quandary.  On its face, we would prefer to eliminate any federal role in interstate commerce in agricultural products, but, were we to eliminate FSIS, then we would extend all responsibilities for food inspection to each individual sovereign state.  For food products destined to enter the stream of commerce between states, we would be compelled to accept the determinations of food inspectors under the authorization of other states to accept products entering into Massachusetts.  Alternatively, we could dispatch Massachusetts inspectors, equipped with food safety standards of our making, to sites of producers in other states to inspect food products destined to be shipped to Massachusetts.  In either circumstance, food inspection, as a practice integrally related to interstate commerce, would become far more complicated for operators in the food industries at all stages of supply chains.  Conversely, leaving food safety and inspection duties in the hands of the federal government would, evidently, simplify matters for producers, but it would take a key element of economic regulation for products of central importance to the lives of every American out of the hands of the states.  It would also leave food safety policies to be treated as a political football, between Congress and divergent partisan executive administrations, staffed at the highest levels by individuals with revolving door connections to corporate operators in the agricultural industry.  In the end, we are satisfied that our larger project of state sovereignty will introduce multitudes of inconveniences to every sector of the macroeconomy of the United States, but inconveniences, in themselves, do not constitute adequate reasons why we should not dismantle particular parts of the federal government inconsistent with our broader commitment to a reimagining of federalism and a restoration of state sovereignty.  We will work to eliminate FSIS and determine the best course to follow to both maintain food safety for our citizens and to stimulate interstate commerce in agricultural products, engaging in collaborative projects with other state governments where it is warranted and to the extent that it increases the availability of safe, nutritious, and economical agricultural products for our citizens.  We will categorically never surrender the development and enforcement of food safety standards, impacting the health and well being of our citizens, to the federal government ever again.    

Proceeding on a common theme, the role of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in food safety determinations needs to be thoroughly considered.  Operating on a different level of inquiry from the day-to-day inspection operations of FSIS, FDA plays an important role in testing both pharmaceutical preparations and everyday food products for determination of possible health risks in consumption.  Such processes are clearly essential to maintenance of public health, especially as food processing operators continue to develop new and novel food additives, appealing to different purposes and desires shaped by relevant market processes.  In our consideration of the development and approval of opiod pain management products, we noted that FDA also suffers from an evident revolving door problem, and it seems this problem is no less evident in its evaluations and determinations on food additives.  Large agro-businesses enjoy prominent connections within the FDA, and these connections shape the regulatory determinations yielded by FDA.  As previously, we would doubt that we could do much better than FDA has, over the course of its history, to efficiently and copiously protect the American public from major and transparent threats emanating from the food supply, mitigating, to the extent possible, any polluting effects from corporate clientelism.  Nonetheless, we cannot concede any role to the federal government in the determination of food safety standards, either at the level of the production plant with FSIS or in the food science laboratory with FDA.  We would acknowledge, in this regard, that the formulation and execution of food safety policy, inclusive of investigation of food products and the issuance of public warnings on the potential health effects from consuming particular food items and additives, remains a preeminently political matter, and we will not surrender any control of such matters to Congress or to partisan federal executive administrators.  In the present context, consumers seeking to moderate their consumption of nitrates from processed meats are confronted with cold meats, bacon, and other processed items containing naturally occurring nitrate sources like celery powder and marketed, under the approval or, minimally, the casual indifference of FDA regulators, as "uncured meats."  Were we to re-envision the development of a food safety investigative community in the interest of our citizens, we are confident that, by erring on the side of caution in conveying to consumers all of the potential risks from consuming products and additives of dubious nutritional value, we might positively impact the aggregate health profile of this Commonwealth, if at the expense of costing manufacturers of "uncured meats" a significant share of their current sales in Massachusetts.  We would similarly convey to every household in Massachusetts the potential dangers evident in use of non-stick cooking products manufactured with hexafluoropropylene oxide-dimer acid (HFPO-DA), the next generation successor of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in non-stick "Teflon" products, yet another political football persistently fumbled in recent times by FDA regulators.  In these terms, the replacement of FDA, in all of its functions, by an agency of the government of the Commonwealth will occupy much attention for us, and we hope, revolving door problems notwithstanding, that our work will evince our commitment to the health and well being of our citizens.

Beyond our efforts to dismantle any role for the federal government in the management of our food systems, we need to articulate our own broader prospective role for this party and for the government of Commonwealth in assuring that all our citizens will remain well nourished and healthy in their consumption of food products.  On a community level, we need to formulate analyses of available food production assets, particularly local agricultural producers, and solicit the assistance of local producers as a component in local organizing efforts.  In effect, we will seek to enhance the operations of local food banks for the neediest of our populations as we push to relieve our communities from dependence on federal financial resources and from the assets mobilized through federal agencies.  As we have argued above with regard to the relationship of municipalities to the federal government, we will organize to find ways, through local financing and provisioning, to ensure that every student in our primary and secondary school systems is afforded a school lunch and, where necessary, a breakfast even in the absence of federal financial assistance.  Moreover, we will seek to steer increasing quantities of impending food waste from food service operations, most critically in the restaurant and hospitality industries, into the hands of needy populations.  It is not our intention, in this regard, to accept food necessarily destined for landfills or compost bins because it is unfit for human consumption as a consequence of either perishability or contamination.  Rather, it is our contention that the quantity of food still fit for consumption and wasted by food service operators, consigned to the waste stream rather than to the bellies of poorly fed individuals, is adequate to meet a substantial degree of the human need that we will confront, and we will do what we can to mobilize it as a source of nourishment.  Once we have begun our organizing efforts in this direction, they will remain continuous.  We are sufficiently convinced that the presence of human nutritional need, not satiated by returns to labor for a great many individuals and households across this Commonwealth, will continue despite our best efforts to stimulate macroeconomic growth, to raise minimum wages for the least skilled workers, to improve access to education and occupational training, or even to provide tax-based basic income resources for every citizen of Massachusetts.  And, even as we emerge as a formidable political presence in the government of the Commonwealth and on the federal level, we will remain to pass the bread and the vegetables and a bowl of soup to every soul deprived of the ability to adequately address their own most elementary needs.    

And we will organize victory gardens, christened in the name of the sovereignty of our Commonwealth and in the hopes of self-sufficiency for its citizens.  Large numbers of citizens will grow food for themselves, for their neighbors, and for their wider communities, including in support of community food pantries for low income residents.  Our urban food deserts will bear fruit, and we, of this party, will work to organize community agricultural resources to support the provision of nutritious food for those most in need.  We will work to organize neighborhood food cooperatives where none exist and labor with the help of existing cooperatives to ensure that no corners of the Commonwealth lack continuous access to fresh produce and healthy alternatives to mass produced, processed food sources and, especially, the fare of fast food outlets.  We will organize farmers' markets in places like Roxbury, the McKnight neighborhood in Springfield, the Holyoke flats, and the Springside neighborhood in Pittsfield, areas where it has heretofore been difficult to obtain fresh, local food and where large numbers of residents have succumbed to a range of dietary-driven afflictions from type II diabetes to coronary heart disease.  The work of feeding ourselves will be a glue that cements our communities in ways that could never be achieved by a well organized corporate supply chain in interstate agricultural capitalism, even if the latter might achieve astounding degrees of cost efficiency.

The nutritional value of potential food sources will, finally, constitute a focus in our efforts at community organization.  As we argue above, we will seek to promote local agricultural production, and, in so doing, we hope that our communities and, in particular, those most benefiting from our work to distribute food assistance will benefit from a shift in the nutritional value of the food products that they consume.  Emphatically, we cannot enforce good nutritional choices on our citizens.  Free people will always be free to consume products that are detrimental to their long term health and well being, but we will do what we can to make better choices available to people who would want to benefit their health and well being through nutrition.  As such, we will seek to promote diets replete with green, leafy vegetables and low in saturated fats and processed food sources to communities with pronounced levels of dietary-driven health afflictions.  Our efforts in this direction may be helped to the extent that we can develop local cooperative endeavors with health care providers to relay health information and to assist us in programming food assistance to individuals and households to whom we are supplementing dietary consumption.  However much we succeed in these measures to alter the way our communities approach food consumption and personal health, our efforts may constitute an improvement on the more liberal methodologies underlying federal food assistance programs. 

Once we have achieved a threshold of political power in Massachusetts, we will begin to address inefficiencies in our local food systems, to account for unexploited opportunities to increase the agricultural self-sufficiency of our citizens, and eliminate residual regional pockets of malnutrition across the Commonwealth.  To be clear, our goal is neither to eliminate imports of food from other states and from foreign sources nor to substitute neighborhood backyard growing cooperatives for supermarket chains.  Nor will we eliminate fast food from the range of culinary options in Massachusetts, but we do aspire to significantly reduce the macroeconomic share of consumed calories emanating from the major fast food chains.  The Massachusetts Department of Agriculture (MDA) will have a much larger role in facilitating our plans for enhancement of local agricultural development, maintenance of food safety, and ecological and economic sustainability for our domestic food producers.  We will invest wholesale food inspection into the hands of MDA.  In the process, we will seek to shift career crop and livestock inspectors from FSIS into newly developed MDA inspection service divisions in order to take advantage of the expertise of skilled professionals and to build a bureaucracy of newly trained professional food inspectors.  In this regard, we will determine the best mechanisms through which to manage compensation of inspectors in order to ensure that no inspectors enjoy pecuniary incentives for enabling the passage of contaminated or degraded product into our food stream.  Conversely, we will seek to minimize the expenses attendant to food inspection for our wholesale food producers, most importantly through the utilization of diagnostic technologies to remotely detect possible sources of food contamination.  Maintenance of food safety in wholesale food production will be shared practical and financial burden between our producers and the government of the Commonwealth.  Where it is feasible, we will maintain existing standards for grading of agricultural produce and meat products and, in particular, standards for certification of organic produce and meats.  As we modify our rules for marketing and sale of agricultural products, we may reconsider the standards attendant to inspection processes, but these issues will evolve over time.  We will also develop an MDA division for research in agricultural resources, markets, consumption, and nutritional attainment across the Commonwealth.  It will be manifestly interdisciplinary in focus, incorporating expertise in resource economics, supply chain analysis, nutritional science, and soil, hydrological, and animal science studies.  We will rely on this division to provide us with periodic comprehensive analyses of agricultural resources in the Commonwealth and of commerce with producers outside of Massachusetts.  They will also evaluate our success in long term priorities in agricultural development and in the elimination of malnutrition within our population and identify areas for concentration in future policy formulation.     

The Agricultural Markets division of MDA will have a pronounced, active role in our plans to enhance self-sufficiency for the Commonwealth in the future.  We will dispatch marketing experts to Massachusetts producers to better implement long term plans for increasing the scale of individual producers, to assist in market engagement, and to ensure that local food producers maintain diversified portfolios of purchasers and end-users of agricultural produce, insulating against risks from further entrepreneurial investment in the broader agricultural marketplace of Massachusetts.  We will also seek to develop agricultural exports.  These efforts will, we hope, make our agricultural sector more durable and resilient against the possibilities of macroeconomic instabilities in the future and, thus, more reliable as a domestic means for procurement of nutritional sustenance for our broader population.  The Agricultural Markets division will also support our broader initiatives to eliminate food waste by developing spot excess inventory plans for individual producers, including distributions to community food pantries and sales agreements with food processors capable of holding frozen perishable products for extended terms.  

In this regard, agriculture and food services in the Commonwealth will remain fields open to the full play of entrepreneurial initiative.  Insofar as we can do our utmost, through MDA and other agencies of the government of the Commonwealth, to lend a hand to individuals and groups advancing with great ideas on development of new agricultural products, integration of new technologies, or marketing of new food items, the onus will remain in the hands of private entrepreneurial parties to come up with those ideas and to meet us half way.  Conversely, the onus will remain on us not to over-regulate our entrepreneurs in agriculture and food services to death.  We, indisputably, have a responsibility to maintain the safety of our food supply, both produced in Massachusetts and arriving in commerce from outside of the Commonwealth, but we cannot make food safety inspections such an onerous and costly process to our producers and retailers that we stifle new investments in food services and agriculture and drive existing firms out of operation.  Likewise, even at the municipal level, we will need public health authorities to exercise a substantial degree of discretion with food service firms, recognizing that compliance with certain prophylactic standards in food handling are absolutely essential to the maintenance of food safety while others, enforcing costly investments on firms, can be satisfied over a longer term period under agreement between health inspectors and firms.  Emphatically, we will continue to operate in conjunction with private industry to maintain and update basic food safety standards and local essential items for public health compliance that local public health departments will continuously and strictly enforce against their local food service establishments.  The larger point that we seek to advance here is that we will always need to work with an open mind alongside our entrepreneurs, who will remain the primary drivers of food production and distribution in Massachusetts.      

Beyond strict consideration of food production, it will remain imperative for us to address packaging waste.  Presently, large numbers of food service firms in the Commonwealth currently employ biodegradable packaging materials, and this is an evident step in the right direction, but we must go further.  We will work to develop community-based systems of reusable food containers, capable of being quickly sanitized in between purchases, to be utilized by ranges of local food service firms, both retailers (i.e. deli) and restaurants, for take-out food items.  Such containers would be manufactured either from glass or from Bisphenol-A (BPA)-free plastics.  Portability will be a major concern, and it may cancel the efficacy of glass containers in most circumstances, but we remain open to a range of experiments in the use of diverse reusable, readily sanitized containers, and our primary concern will reside in compliance with standards on the capacity of such containers to be readily sanitized.  Durability is also, certainly, an issue, and we would want containers to be serviceable for reuse over substantial extended periods, maybe for years.  We would envision the use of containers that might be readily carried by individuals on an everyday basis, packaged in light, easy to carry totes.  The mass distribution of such containers would be effected through individual retailers or food service establishments, and the financial investment for development of systems for production and distribution of reusable containers would be shared between retailers/food service establishments, local governments, and the government of the Commonwealth.  In this regard, individual firms would certainly be welcomed to develop compliant proprietary designs with a partial financial offset from public authorities, but we will insist that no firms will be authorized to exclude use of otherwise compliant containers by patrons when the proprietary containers of the firm are not used.  Finally, we would want to consider the role of food grade sanitizing solutions, ensuring that all sanitizers approved for use in the Commonwealth are safe and effective in eliminating possible microbial surface infectants on containers and do not, in turn, contribute to other possible health risks from contact either by consumers or by food service staff, or from runoff of sanitizers into the waste-water/sewage stream.   

If such initiatives prove successful, we believe that the face of retail food marketing and distribution in the Commonwealth will be profoundly transformed.  We will eliminate wide ranges of single-use plastic packaging from use in the Commonwealth.  Styrofoam and polystyrene containers might quickly disappear entirely from use.  Significant expenses on packaging materials by food service firms will decline on the macro-level over time, as larger quantities of reusable containers come into circulation.  The need to ensure that containers are fully sanitized prior to use will increase the labor intensity of take-out food, both in restaurants and in food retail establishments.  In particular, the sale of food items in fast food establishments would be significantly changed in ways that would increase the labor intensity of fast food.  Patrons of such establishments might have to choose between dining in on proprietary reusable vessels (e.g. durable, compliant plastic plates) that would remain within the establishment to be cleaned, sanitized, and reused, or taking food out in their own reusable vessels, which would have to be rapidly sanitized prior to use.  Such increases in demand for labor in food services will be an investment by private industry and larger communities in the reduction of packaging waste in our landfills and, thus, will substitute more labor in the near term for less land use and despoliation in the more distant future.  Our municipalities will see their expenditures on solid waste management decline over time, even as they confront issues in more intensive utilization of water resources for sanitizing of containers.  In this regard, our efforts in this direction will certainly be a work in progress on which we will hopefully improve over time.   

As we have argued above, we will commit the government of the Commonwealth to embark on food science research through the formation of an independent agency, directed to fill the role currently served by FDA.  As we have similarly argued, it may not be completely possible for us to eliminate clientelism and the revolving door problem in such an agency, both with respect to food products and research into pharmaceuticals.  The experts in whom we would entrust the capacity to regulate food products, food additives, industrial chemicals, pharmaceutical products, and dietary supplements will, certainly, come into service for the Commonwealth with connections to the same private industries that they will be compelled to regulate, even if such individuals have arrived via detours into academia.  In this respect, the General Court of the Commonwealth will certainly have to exercise ready legislative oversight over the regulators to ensure that private industry are not exercising undue influence over the maintenance of public health and safety.  We are confident that we will be able to achieve these ends and that science, impartially enunciated, will be the fundamental basis upon which we will work to protect our citizens from potential risks from our food supply and other components of everyday human existence.   

A range of determinations on food safety will evidently occupy the laboratory researchers of our food science agency from the outset.  Most significantly, recent attention has resonated concerning the safety and nutritional efficacy of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), agricultural products altered at the level of the genome/genetic coding to address particular deficiencies in the cultivation, harvesting, transportation, processing, or subsequent marketing of particular agricultural products.  Proprietary genetic designs for seeds/seedlings have been developed to make a particular potato cultivar resilient to fungal blights, to make particular apple varieties resistant to certain common parasitic insect species, to increase the vitality of blueberries traveling in refrigeration from Peru to New Jersey, and to make particular varieties of tomatoes look more red, lustrous, and unblemished in a grocery store shelf for up to eleven days after harvest.  We would certainly want to ensure that all such products are thoroughly assessed by our food science professionals to determine possible risks to human health from consumption of GMOs.  On the other hand, we cannot indulge an urge evident among many of our citizens to suspect inherent dangers from consumption of all GMOs, absent any detailed scientific analysis.  Certain parties would have public health authorities wage a holy crusade, supported by unsubstantiated internet conspiracy theories, in the name of undefiled nature against every project to alter the genetic material of any agricultural product around human dietary needs, economic imperatives, or ecological sustainability.  Rather, we will implore our scientific professionals to proceed with copious investigative zeal in their analyses of the health benefits and risks from consumption of GMO products.  In this regard, we are not only hopeful that we will dispel, for our citizens, any naturalistic conspiracy theories concerning the dangers of GMO food but also help to illuminate particular research agendas in the genetic manipulation of indigenous agricultural products in Massachusetts, supporting our own efforts to nurture technological change impacting the long term viability of our food supply.  

     

Numerous specificities on food policy remain to be considered here.  Specifically, we need to consider how we mean to steer agricultural production in the Commonwealth both in relation to internal and external market demand for particular outputs and in relation to our objectives for domestic sustainability and wholesome support of dietary needs for our citizens.  We have argued above that we will utilize the agencies of MDA, in particular our Agricultural Markets division, to support entrepreneurship in agriculture and food services, but where can we best contribute our public investments in agriculture to make the most substantial impacts on our economy and on the health and well being of our citizens?  Emphatically, Massachusetts is not fertile ground for growing adequate quantities of cereal grains to satisfy mass food service industrial demand across the Commonwealth.  Our forebears understood this basic reality at least as early as the 1820s, when large numbers of young, Yankee Protestant farm boys from Massachusetts, reared to till the soil, began making their way out to the Ohio Valley, Michigan, Indiana, and other areas better suited to cultivating wheat and corn, and the farm fields that had, from the early Seventeenth century, been cleared and walled in over the hills and valleys of our Commonwealth were commended increasingly back to nature, so much so that, in our time, we cannot remember a time when forests, interspersed with isolated stone walls, did not cover much of the rural terrain in our state.  Conversely, some meaningful place may exist for specialized grains that can be suitably cultivated to adequate scale locally, like oats or hops for beer production.  Pertinent questions clearly exist here regarding the particular role served by particular agricultural products and the capacity to cultivate particular products to adequate scale for the industries they serve within Massachusetts.  

We will forever engage in commerce with other states to derive adequate quantities of wheat flour for baked goods produced in our state's macroeconomy.  We may never obtain adequate quantities of diverse varieties of hops from internal agriculture to satisfy demand from our microbreweries.  We recognize that we do not have the power to autonomously transform the terrain and hydrological assets and the climate that nature has assigned to our Commonwealth and from which we are consigned to particular limitations on the capacity to develop our agricultural sector.  On the other hand, we will continue to examine the ways in which technologies can help us to incrementally bend those limitations, and we will support entrepreneurial minds with great ideas about how we can feed our people here at home or, more minimally, generate inputs for diverse agricultural products that might not otherwise be developed here.  In this regard, what potential does year-round use of hydroponic technology have for urban agriculture in cultivation of a range of agricultural products?  Can cultivation of produce through a range of diverse synthetic, nutrient-based media yield substantial gains in agricultural outputs for Massachusetts without extensive utilization of land space, let alone arable soil?  What levels of investment might make such alternative agricultural methodologies viable and economically and ecologically sustainable for Massachusetts?  Might we be able to produce adequate quantities of nutrient-rich green plants (e.g. lettuces, spinach, kale, etc.) in spatially compact urban greenhouse farms to satisfy year-round demand for these products by our population without recourse to external commerce and at a competitive cost per unit of output?  These are the sorts of questions that we will be prone to ask more frequently as we move forward with our project of democratic sovereignty because the answers will shape our capacity to exercise economic autonomy relative to our countrymen in the other states and to our foreign neighbors. 

Animal husbandry, dairy production, and rearing of livestock for meat raise still more questions for us.  It is apparent to us that, on the one hand, ready demand for animal products exists and will continue to exist well into the future for Massachusetts and, on the other hand, a limited capacity for local production of animal products also exists within the Commonwealth.  We need to take a long look at our dairy industry and at the production of meat products emanating from Massachusetts in order to evaluate our assets and limitations relative to local demand for a range of products.  This demand is, further, complicated to the extent that consumption of meat products may constitute an area of aggregate food consumption that we would want to target in a larger effort to transform the dietary patterns of our citizens over the long run.  Ethical considerations on meat consumption aside, we recognize that healthier diets, supporting reductions in the aggregate prevalence of heart disease, type II diabetes, and certain environmentally-conditioned cancers across a population, are related to moderation in consumption of high saturated fat sources and, especially, red meat.  We, similarly, acknowledge that particular patterns in industrial-scale livestock production in the United States, especially the intensive utilization of antibiotic medications in both poultry and red meat, may promote a range of adverse public health effects.  With these considerations in mind, we may develop a more rigorous set of standards governing commerce in poultry and red meat for the Commonwealth, supplementing already existing standards in support of public health and the ethical treatment of animals.  We would anticipate that the incorporation of more rigorous standards regarding meat products would tend to raise the prices of such products and compel some segments of our population to substitute alternative, healthier sources of protein, like legumes and soy products.  On the other hand, to the extent that we prioritize state support for local production of livestock for meat in Massachusetts, such a shift in cost structures may yield partial benefits for local producers, whose outputs would be rendered more competitive, on the basis of price, relative to sources outside of the Commonwealth.

Meat and dairy production in Massachusetts raises still other concerns for us that we will continuously have to address over time.  Emphatically, the carbon footprint in livestock production remains a serious concern as we plan to address the need to reduce carbon emissions in Massachusetts.  Livestock production may not constitute a significant share of aggregate economic activity in the Commonwealth at present, but, assuming we accord a privileged place to domestic animal husbandry to make up an increasing share of aggregate food consumption over time, we will need to incorporate carbon offsets against the increasing carbon footprint of the agricultural sector.  Significantly, dairy and beef production, which remains limited in scale in Massachusetts and manifests the comparatively largest share of carbon generation among diverse forms of animal husbandry, will have to remain strictly limited or, otherwise, restructured as technological change enables us to offset or reduce the carbon cost of beef and dairy cattle.  Beyond the issue of carbon, there is the problem of biological waste products and potential despoliation of land and water resources.  The more beef and dairy cattle, lamb, swine, and poultry we produce in Massachusetts, the better we will have to develop plans to either recycle or sustainably store animal wastes in order to ensure the protection of clean air and water for our citizens.  Definitively, we are confident that livestock production in Massachusetts will increase over time and that it will assume a larger share, though by no means a majority, of our aggregate consumption of meat and dairy products in the Commonwealth, and we will deal, as best we can, with the problems arising from such a change.  Alternatively, we are bullish on the potential for certain technological changes in meat production, especially cultured meat, generated through in-vitro cellular media in place of the slaughtering of live animals.  Products generated through such technologies may encompass a very small share of total meat consumption in the Commonwealth even well into the future, but it does offer a potential for domestic production of particular, specialized meat products that would avoid many of the problems that we would otherwise associate with increased livestock production.

Management of oceanic fisheries and of the long term commercial viability of our fishing fleets raises still further questions as the Commonwealth moves forward and as we retract the administrative reach of the federal government.  Seafood will remain an important component in the range of desirable proteins constituting the diets of our residents, and commercial maritime operators from Massachusetts ports will continue to exploit a range of wild fish and shellfish species to the extent that we are capable of maintaining the sustainability of such species.  In this regard, we confront a much larger collective action problem in the maintenance of sustainable stocks of diverse species off our shores, especially cod and haddock, and, more fundamentally, we recognize that maritime fishing operators in Massachusetts are increasingly being compelled to go farther afield to locate and harvest certain species in high commercial demand.  We recognize that it is beyond the abilities of the government of the Commonwealth to meaningfully impact the viability of commercial exploitation of wild species off our shores.  As such, it is our intention to support the continued mission of the federal National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and cooperation with the regulatory determinations of the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC).  We will enable NMFS inspectors, working directly with commercial operators and maritime wholesaling houses and in conjunction with maritime enforcement authorities of the U.S. Coast Guard, to oversee daily harvests by Massachusetts commercial fleets and to undertake biological monitoring of fishing operations both to ensure compliance with regulatory restrictions and limitations on harvesting of particular species and to continuously develop new statistical assessments and new management plans on the sustainability of such species.  We acknowledge that, in certain respects, segments of the commercial fishing community within the Commonwealth may evince a degree of disappointment in our commitment to maintain the existing regulatory structure governing the utilization of nearby fisheries, but we simultaneously recognize that, in the absence of comprehensive controls and rigorous enforcement against over-fishing, the continued existence of a commercial fishing industry in Massachusetts will be imperiled.  As in numerous other circumstances, it will fall to the government of the Commonwealth to mind the big picture for our collective fishing industry under circumstances where individual commercial operators can only confront their own individual well being on a day-to-day basis as they are compelled to accept limitations on their capacity to increase the scale of their operations.  

Furthermore, the long term viability of a range of commercial maritime harvesting activities, particularly those involving local commercially exploitable shellfish species, will significantly be shaped by our efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.  In numerous, diverse maritime ecosystems along American shores, commercial exploitation of shellfish has been significantly impacted by climate change and by the effects of industrial runoff of nitrogenous and phosphorous waste products into maritime environments.  The increasing prevalence of biotoxins like those produced by algal species associated with "red tide, " linked in turn to agro-industrial runoff into river systems, manifests significant costs to commercial shellfish harvesters, both in terms of lost productivity and forced destruction of contaminated harvests.  Moreover, increasing acidification of oceanic bodies associated with climatological warming has been shown to manifest adverse effects on the synthesis of calcium carbonate shell matter by a range of shellfish species.  In conjunction with our larger efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change, we will work actively with NMFS, its research facilities, and our commercial shellfish industry to manage the health of our shoreline ecosystems to ensure the long term commercial viability of harvesting activities for clams, oysters, mussels, scallops, and other commercially exploited species.  We will, further, investigate the possible effects of climate change and potential avenues for mitigation with regard to the harvesting of marine crustacean species along our shores, both to protect already existing commercial activities and to identify new exploitable species for local consumption.  And we will assist local communities and commercial fishing and shellfish operators to control recent incursions of invasive, predatory, non-native crustacean species, especially green crabs and Asian shore crabs.   

Alternatively, the growth of commercial aquaculture may offer new possibilities for development of viable and sustainable substitutes for wild caught fish and shellfish species.  Among shellfish, oyster and clam/quahog farming is already quite prevalent in numerous seaboard areas of the Commonwealth, especially on Cape Cod, and evidence suggests that farming of oysters, in particular, yields ecological benefits related both to natural water filtration by oyster species and to the capacity of oyster reefs to mitigate soil erosion close to shoreline.  With regard to fish species, commercial farming of various trout species, as well as tilapia, black sea bass, and barramundi, already exists within the Commonwealth, and we are anxious to promote further entrepreneurial projects where commercial viability and technological efficacy presents itself.  Moreover, we are confident that technological change and learning-by-doing in aquaculture will, over time, realize improvements in standards for the maintenance of water quality and recycling of animal wastes, and in the assurance of ethical conditions for cultivation of healthy and commercially desirable fish stocks.  In these terms, even as we contemplate a context of recurring future change in the harvesting of both wild and farm-raised fish and shellfish in Massachusetts, we are confident that the Commonwealth will continue to generate ready sources of aquatic protein to both satisfy the dietary needs of our own citizens and to export for markets outside of the Commonwealth.  

We have already suggested that our community organizing efforts will concentrate, to a substantial degree, in managing food wastage at the community level, promote local projects of backyard "victory" garden agriculture, and support the development of local food cultivation and distributive cooperatives.  We recognize that these efforts may remain inadequate to entirely satisfy our broader objective to completely alleviate malnutrition in the Commonwealth.  There may yet be a role to be played by direct financial assistance for the purchase of food items by low-income individuals, equivalent to currently existing federal SNAP and WIC assistance programs.  On the other hand, we need to evaluate the efficacy of such programs over time, as we progressively integrate universal basic income initiatives and other forms of direct assistance to low-income households.  We may yet retain such food assistance programs well into the future, but we are hopeful that our community organizing initiatives around food security will render most financial assistance to households wholly redundant and that we can bid food stamps farewell as a necessary ameliorative of the past no longer suited to the conditions of our sovereign future.    

At this moment, it would be wholly visionary to imagine what our food systems in Massachusetts will look like fifty years from now, at a moment when the work of our generation may or may not have borne fruit in transforming so many aspects of everyday life in our Commonwealth.  We do not know whether there will remain supermarkets with bins full of produce and meats from distant states and foreign agricultural sources and wide arrays of processed foods.  Our initial hope would be to ensure that our citizens continue to enjoy a wide range of dietary choices, both for groceries to be prepared at home and for the prepared food sources of our restaurant and food service sectors.  We would simultaneously seek to create an ever increasing profile for local food cultivation and distribution, for plant-based food sources, for red meat and poultry, for dairy items, and for seafood.  And we would seek to spur the entrepreneurial energies of our citizens to develop agricultural exports.  All of these goals, framed around our own larger objective to alleviate malnutrition among our citizens, will animate us to be creative in meeting the basic needs of our citizens as we move forward into a sovereign future for the Commonwealth.  

Arts and the Creative Entrepreneuriat: Discovering the Boundaries of the Human Imagination

The central virtue of free expression.  Public artists, public compensation for commissioned works.  Free inquiry into divergent schools of artistic expression in the fine arts, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, literary works, rhetoric, spiritualism, architecture.  How do we make Massachusetts into a free space for artistic discovery that might simultaneously nurture art as industry and a vein of commerce?  

 

Ecology and the Management of Carbon Emissions

More than any other aspect of reality by which we are confronted, climate change remains an omnipresent threat to all of humanity and to the health of all life on the planet.  We have hinted at this reality throughout this document, but we intend to augment these cursory suggestions here with a set of concrete recommendations for how we intend to mitigate the effects of climate change on our macroeconomy and the everyday lives of our citizens in Massachusetts and, further, how we intend to develop a post-carbon economic model for ourselves and as a blueprint for our countrymen in the other sovereign states and for our fellow human beings throughout the world.  Most of the elements to be considered here are not necessarily new, however, we aspire to construct a novel mix of measures that will not only secure our unique needs against the particular climatological threats faced by the Commonwealth but also evince a commitment on our part to take the climatological transformation of the planet seriously.  Moreover, as in every other component of our party's program, we intend to consider in what way the missions assigned to the federal government of the United States will change as a result of climate change.  We are hopeful, in this respect, that the role of the federal government in managing interstate climatological threats will no longer incite significant resistance among our more conservative and reactionary countrymen of the great middle, but we simultaneously cannot afford to minimize the gravity of the threat we face against the reality of a chronically warming planet, and we will struggle to ensure that our countrymen are compelled to face this reality even if we transcend their own limited investments in a post-carbon future.

To begin, our efforts will be provisionally grounded on the baseline goals of the Paris Accord of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2°C and to aggressively pursue a limit on the global average temperature of less than 1.5°C, to increase the global capacity to adapt to climate change and foster climate resilience and reduced greenhouse gas emissions without threatening food production, and to adjust global financial flows in a manner that supports reduced greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilient development.  In this regard, we fully understand that global progress toward the goals envisioned in the Paris Accord will shape our efforts over time and that, as a singular element of a larger national macroeconomy responsible for the second largest national share of greenhouse gas emissions, we will be compelled to bear a disproportionate burden in the global effort to reduce carbon emissions and to support the efforts of the less developed national macroeconomies to divest from greenhouse gas-driven industrialization in favor of ecologically sustainable developmental models.  Effectively, the advanced national macroeconomies will be compelled to bankroll increases in the standards of living of poorer states, notably those of sub-Saharan African and of marginalized regions in Central and South America and in Southeast and Central Asia.  Economic development in these regions must, emphatically, be grounded in methodologies that limit the utilization of fossil fuels for electrification and transportation and that, further, prioritize uplifting and stabilizing consumption possibilities through globally extensive commerce and intensive localized development of agricultural and ecologically sustainable staple industrial goods production.  In our relatively high standard of living and of industrial development, we will commit Massachusetts to supporting such ends by actively participating in efforts to discover such sustainable developmental models that conform to the political and cultural values embodied by recipient states in the developing world and by committing financial resources and manpower where needed to support our partners in these states.  We, further, recognize our own compulsion to reconfigure our carbon energy-intensive macroeconomy to reduce our positive contribution to global emissions of greenhouse gases, pursuant to the larger goal of limiting global average temperature change.  Finally, and, to a certain degree, most evidently, we will commit resources to making the Commonwealth resilient to the effects of climate change in conjunction with our countrymen in the other states and through the mechanism of the federal government of the United States.  

Our singular commitment to maintain a central government through which resources can be collectively assembled among the many states will serve as testimony to our belief that climate change, as a crisis facing every American, can only be successfully addressed through a collective response across the entire country through the vehicle of representation in Congress.  We acknowledge, in this respect, that such a commitment will be constantly put to the test by our countrymen who have, to date, resisted either the reality of climate change or its grounding in human economic activity.  In point of fact, our larger partisan project to diminish the powers residing in the hands of the federal government and transfer as much of this authority back into the hands of the states has been founded on the principle that we need to limit the terms through which we approach our countrymen in assembly to address matters of collective concern to every state, and, as climate change dominates all such concerns, we will express the imperative that policies oriented toward the climatological resilience of American citizens throughout each of the states deserve at least as much of our collective attention as continental defense.  We will insist as much, and we are confident that, as our countrymen face an ever increasing deluge of ecological disasters, driven by the momentum of rising global temperatures, they will, either gradually or punctually, be compelled to listen to our arguments.  

At the present moment, we do not know what will happen to a vast array of federal administrative agencies focused on the global climate or on the natural world, more generally.  Most succinctly, we would seek to retain a role for a federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as the central administrative locus for enforcing a range of federal laws oriented toward the maintenance of common endowments in water and air transcending the boundaries of individual states and to serve as a central coordinating entity for multi-state projects for the reduction of carbon emissions, but we simultaneously question the capacity of Congress, under the circumscribed sets of powers to which we would Constitutionally assign, to authorize the continued existence of such an administration.  Emphatically, we would by no means condone any justification emanating from Congress' presently enumerated authority to regulate interstate commerce, a power that we intend to write out of existence in its current form.  In these terms, if there is to be an EPA, a Clean Water Act, or a Clean Air Act, then we will need to make our case to our countrymen that adequate rationale exists to write into existence broadly enumerated powers for Congress to protect atmospheric, hydrological, and other natural endowments common to Americans across multiple states.  Such an extension of power may be too much to bear for many of our countrymen, and, in this event, we will be compelled to bid the EPA and the bodies of federal law that it was empowered to enforce farewell and to proceed through a far more improvised regime of climatological protection through litigation in the federal judiciary, perhaps with reliance on no more than English Common Law principles undergirding any challenge by one state against the actions of another over the maintenance of clean air or clean water.  We will accept such a sacrifice if it is the cost of our sovereignty, but we hope that we can devise a more robust collective regime of environmental protection between the states under a revised institution of enumerated Congressional powers, with clearly enunciated statutory standards and robustly empowered administrative enforcement authorities. 

Elaborating further, we recognize that the existence and legally sanctioned activities of a range of federal agencies oriented toward the maintenance of federal property, especially in land, within the territorial jurisdictions of numerous individual states has constituted an inflammatory instigation against the sovereign aspirations of many residents.  In particular, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has incited local resistance in certain areas from prospective lease holders of hydro-carbon extraction permits and from cattle ranchers seeking to utilize federal lands without assessment of federally authorized grazing fees.  Recognizing that the federal government is entitled to act in the interests of all American citizens in its management of federal lands and of underlying mineral assets, we would question the Constitutional authority under which the federal government continues to hold claim to land under the territorial jurisdiction of particular states, beyond the expressed and enumerated Constitutional authorities of Congress.  As such, we would scrap BLM and convey the lands presently under its administration back to the states within which they are located, for disposal in accordance with the wishes of the citizens of those states.  We would similarly convey to each of the states within which national parks are established full authority to dispose of their existence as they see fit and, consequently, abolish the National Parks Service as a federal entity.  We would hope that the people of Arizona find in the natural magnificence of the Grand Canyon an adequate rationale to ensure that it will never fall victim to diverse forms of exploitative development and resource extraction, but we simultaneously acknowledge that we cannot force the citizens of a sovereign Arizona to see the timeless character of undespoiled nature as a virtue worth protection against the destructive possibilities of short term economic gain.  Finally, we intend to convey the federal lands under management of the U.S. Forest Service back to each of the states within which the national forests reside as we eliminate this agency.  In turn, states like Oregon will be confronted with a range of new questions regarding the utilization of old growth forests for diverse potential uses, including extraction.  We, in Massachusetts, will not levy the weight of the Endangered Species Act to compel our countrymen in the Pacific Northwest to protect spotted owls at the sacrifice of lumbering jobs, but we do sincerely hope that the experience of over twenty years of transitioning toward a mix of eco-tourism and sustainable land stewardship by extractive firms will shape the approach our countrymen will take going forward as they gain sovereign authority over all of their lands.  

In general, we concede that our intended course of Constitutional transformation will extend substantial powers back into the hands of the states to be either the farsighted stewards or the unprincipled short term exploiters of their land and natural resources, and this extension of power will, in certain ways, constitute an unparalleled obstacle for us as we attempt to craft policies to deal with the long term effects of climate change on our Commonwealth.  This is unavoidable, and we will utilize the tools that remain to collaborate with our countrymen and/or to police the worst excesses of literal extractive strip mine capitalism through the federal judiciary.  If there cannot be a federal EPA to administer uniform rules on the use of natural resources transcending state boundaries, then we will pursue civil actions through the federal judiciary for common law nuisance under the principle sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas ("use your own property in a manner so as not to damage the use of another's property").  If Vermont chooses to construct new obstructions to the free flow of the Connecticut River or its western tributaries in a manner that damages economic activities in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, then we will empower the Attorney General of the Commonwealth to pursue civil relief through the federal judiciary for the citizens of the Commonwealth against the government of the state of Vermont.  Similarly, if the Clean Air Act does not survive in our transformed federal relationship, then we would expect states like Delaware or Maryland to sue in federal court on common law principles to punish states like Ohio or Kentucky for the adverse effects of uncontrolled atmospheric carbon emissions on the former's economy and on the health and well being of its citizens.  Such a transformation in the juridical structure of arguments and standards of proof undergirding causal claims of damage between states will evolve over time as individual sovereign states progressively lose the capacity to seek relief under the terms of federal statutory standards and as the federal judiciary becomes inundated with competing claims by certain states regarding the adverse effects of climate change, in turn, shaped by the particular approach of other states toward carbon emissions.  If, in these regards, certain states encounter a continuous stream of causal findings of fault over their approach to the regulation of carbon emissions, resulting in substantial outflow of incomes to aggrieved states, then such guilty parties might be compelled over time to reform their policies on carbon emissions.        

If the above elaboration represents our worst case scenario for a United States reconfigured on new federal relationships and restored state sovereignty, then we would certainly hope that we could construct a set of collective institutions that would actively manage a national response to climate change and, minimally, assemble collective resources to respond to diverse adverse effects of climate change on individual states.  Emphatically, as we have argued, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) cannot be eliminated.  Individual states will continuously seek recourse to the help of their countrymen in the other states to respond to catastrophic climatological events.  Moreover, we envision a broader mandate for FEMA to proactively invest in the hardening of climatologically compromised geographies and to compel individual states to undertake regional durability planning in cooperation with the federal government as a prerequisite for the receipt of federal assistance.  That is to say, we would want FEMA to actively respond to the presence of human need from our countrymen in the Texas Riviera of Padre Island the next time a Category Four hurricane strikes this area, but we would similarly insist that FEMA proactively compel Texas to accept, as a condition of further federal assistance, including continued provision of flood insurance to local residents, regional planning restrictions on development of new residential structures and reconstruction of damaged structures on Padre Island and in other outboard areas on the Gulf shore.  We would, for our part, accept such proactive standards on residential and commercial construction in compromised geographies of Massachusetts, and we will accept nothing less from our countrymen as a condition of working together to adjust to the adverse effects of climate change.  

Considered in greater detail, we need to investigate the particular investments that the Commonwealth should make to enhance the resiliency of our infrastructures to the progress of climate change.  In particular, how will we need to respond to sea level elevation along our shoreline?  Will communities like Provincetown, Scituate, and Hull continue to be habitable fifty years from now?  How will sea level rise impact settlement patterns on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard?  Will the islands continue to be habitable?  Will we have to elevate structures and roadways along the shoreline on the South Boston peninsula and along Atlantic Avenue in the Boston financial district?  Will we continue to have habitable beachfront residential property and recreational areas on the North Shore up to the mouth of the Merrimack River and beyond through the New Hampshire line?  In a certain respect, we acknowledge that we will be compelled, over time, to abandon certain seaboard areas from human settlement as a result of rising sea level.  On the other hand, to the extent that we are able to construct infrastructures that will enable certain seaboard areas to weather sea level elevation, we will need to establish priorities in the protection of certain areas.  For obvious reasons, the continued viability of residential settlement and commercial investments in the central areas of Boston, especially around the financial district, Beacon Hill, and the mouth of the Charles extending toward the Back Bay will remain critical for us, and we will investigate possible infrastructure amelioratives that can protect these areas, especially the construction of sea walls in Boston Harbor.  We would not necessarily want to entertain pie-in-the-sky, exorbitantly expensive schemes to protect such areas, but, as a practical matter, we acknowledge that difficult choices will have to be made regarding the protection of critical, heavily populated areas of the Commonwealth.  In the decades following the Boston Artery Project, a financial money pit unparalleled in the history of public works projects for the Commonwealth, we would simultaneously ask how far we would be willing to invest public resources to protect Boston from rising sea levels and what threshold of proof in the efficacy of civil engineering amelioratives would be compelling for us to accept in committing to a particular project.  In the end, we may simply have to accept that large areas of current settlement in metropolitan Boston will be uninhabitable in the future, and if we do so, then we will plan accordingly to relocate populations and key infrastructures inland.

It would seem less likely that we will encounter comparable negative environmental effects in our inland areas, however, it is certain that we will encounter greater variability in weather events, potentially more Nor-easter winter events and greater vulnerability to summer tropical storms.  We are hopeful that our inland areas do not become increasingly vulnerable to particular manifestations of destructive weather, especially tornadoes.  We recognize that "one hundred year" weather events may become more common.  In particular, heavy late winter snowfall in the upper areas of the Connecticut River estuary, coupled with a rapid spring thaw, might be apt to produce destructive inundation in diverse sections of the Pioneer Valley.  Such a pattern was evident in the region's 1936 flood, and the valley remains vulnerable to a repetition of such catastrophic flooding.  Furthermore, as we have already hinted, climate change may introduce a range of unpredictable negative and at least some potentially positive effects on agriculture for the Commonwealth.  It is conceivable that certain areas will enjoy a modest increase in their growing seasons, however, without any augmentation of the arable quality of the soil.  Anyone who might posit agricultural benefits from global warming in Massachusetts should recall that, in many areas of our Commonwealth, our sovereign soil is better at up-welling boulders from the last local orogeny than at cultivating grain.  Furthermore, it is worth taking seriously the potential for rapid and unpredictable changes in rainfall, ground water, and hydration, generally, as effects of climate change in New England.  Drought is becoming an omnipresent reality, if not yet a catastrophic one, for many regions of the Commonwealth, and agriculture will bear a burden of changing patterns of hydration at least as heavy as our urban regions in our efforts to maintain adequate and reliable sources of clean potable drinking water for growing populations.  We will be mindful of the effects of climate change on our agricultural sector and, especially, on our fishing and shellfish harvesting industries that will be prone to punctuated effects from the warming and increasing acidification of marine environments on our shores.

    

We acknowledge that every citizen of the Commonwealth will bear a burden to adjust their everyday behaviors and their lifestyles to the demands of reducing the carbon footprint of Massachusetts.  Furthermore, as we begin our broader partisan project through community organizing and until we realize a threshold level of political power in Massachusetts and at the federal level, we will proceed with a sober resolve that climate change constitutes a critical and fundamental threat to the future of our Commonwealth against which we are compelled to advocate intentional and radical transformations to our macroeconomy and our collective way of life.  Acknowledging the arguments from diverse voices within the environmentalist community that nothing short of coordinated global action can save humanity from the increase in global greenhouse gas accumulations, every effort to diminish the potential effects of collective action on the micro-level to reduce the carbon footprints of discrete populations is unhelpful.  We will labor to organize our communities for the purpose of encouraging and deepening the efforts of every municipality in Massachusetts to reduce hydrocarbon usage in power generation, transportation, and diverse economic activities.  We will organize car pools and support energy efficient retrofitting of residential and commercial structures through MassSave and other initiatives through energy producers.  We will stand by the efforts of any political actors in Massachusetts to promote enforcement of California emissions standards on new automobiles and back efforts to close out all future sales of new model automobiles with internal combustion engines by 2035.  As such, we will support the inclusion of electric automobile charging ports in new residential construction building codes, and we will make comprehensive energy infrastructural adjustments in response to climate change a priority in local municipal policy formulation as we move forward electorally, to be supplemented as we gain power in the government of the Commonwealth.

As we have hinted above, the transformation of our power grid in Massachusetts and, in particular, the mix of green power generation sources will greatly occupy our attention as we consider our collective resiliency in the face of climate change.  Emphatically, our present dependence on natural gas as the principal source of energy for electrical power generation in the Commonwealth must change in the future.  We acknowledge that the transition away from dirtier energy sources like bituminous coal has benefited our carbon footprint and our regional air quality substantially, however we also recognize that any burning of fossil fuels contributes to larger atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases and that the technological dynamics that made natural gas such an affordable and reasonable energy source for the United States as a whole introduces a range of ancillary environmental costs.  Fluids and well proppants utilized in the process of hydraulic fracturing of underlying shale gas deposits must be safely managed to prevent contamination of surface and ground water, and the fracturing process itself manifests problems from excess atmospheric leakage of methane and from induced seismic activity as shale formations along fault lines are mechanically disturbed.  It suffices to say that we would never authorize hydraulic fracturing in Massachusetts even if underlying exploitable sources of methane might be identified within our jurisdictions, but our continued reliance on natural gas invariably perpetuates hydraulic fracturing in other states and, most critically, in Western New York and Pennsylvania.  For the sake of the planet as a whole and for the sake of our countrymen in these states, for whom the ledger outlining all the costs of fracking on future generations has yet to be completely compiled, we must replace natural gas in energy generation, in home heating and cooking, and in industrial uses in Massachusetts with sustainable alternatives.  Such a transition away from natural gas, especially coupled with a prolonged transition away from internal combustion engine vehicles in favor of electric vehicles for household and commercial/transportation use, will place substantial stress on our electrical grid and on all available existing sources of green energy generation.  In effect, we will be multiplying the range of processes that will be dependent on green electricity multi-fold even as we remove a principal fuel source for electrical power generation entirely from our grid.  As challenging as this will be, we truly have no choice but to embark on such a transformation of energy use and, further, to constantly revise our green power generation plans as we have to deal with changing environmental conditions in Massachusetts.

If natural gas goes away, then how will we replace it as the primary anchor of power generation on an increasingly stressed electrical grid?  A range of responses immediately present themselves.  First, we will evidently rely more intensively in green electrical technologies, principally wind, solar, hydro, and tidal.  We are not keen on reintroducing past technologies in fissile nuclear power, but, over time, as fusion technologies become more viable, they might have a place in our power grid.  We are, likewise, not keen on biomass power generation, even to the extent that it poses the possibility for regulation of waste products that would otherwise be deposited into landfills.  Any burning of carboniferous matter will contribute to climate change, whether or not such matter is composed largely of fossil fuels or discarded wooden building materials.  Geothermal, particularly as a source of heating for residential and commercial structures and, secondarily, as a source for powering electrical turbines, intrigues us.  We do not presently know the extent to which geothermal power might offer us a viable and reliable source of heating and power generation for the Commonwealth, but we will certainly investigate the use of geothermal power in diverse international contexts, minding, in turn, that certain geothermal technologies are extremely context/geographically dependent.  

As we argued above, the structure of the grid, itself, may change over time, and such changes will introduce challenges and opportunities for the integration of green technologies into a more resilient power generation structure.  If we succeed in multiplying the structure of the macro-grid to integrate the utilization of a multiplicity of separable local micro-grids, then we would certainly need to re-conceptualize the necessary operative scale of power generation to safely and reliably secure continuous electrical power for a given local area.  Even as we continue to work with ISO New England to manage the macro-grid and to integrate diverse new green energy generation sources, we will simultaneously collaborate with the ISO to ensure the separability of new power generators through a two-stream methodology with local direct current generation and battery storage for the micro-grid and alternating current conversion for the macro-grid.  Such a transition in the structure of power generation would, no doubt, introduce significant complications for all users across the Commonwealth.  Committing to the creation of a multi-structured, micro- and macro-grid electrical power system, incorporating both direct and alternating current, may, in this regard, necessitate some reevaluation of electrical building codes in order ensure that no parts of the macro-grid will be left out under circumstances in which emergency conditions compel us to pivot toward strict reliance on local micro-grids.  However, we are convinced that, if properly managed, the development of such a structure will improve systemic efficiencies, reliability, and resiliency and more readily make use of the green electrical power infrastructures in which we will invest.  

Ingenious development of electrical grids and of local structures to replace fossil fuel use in household environments and transit-driven development and spatial planning may take Massachusetts substantially in the direction of a post-carbon economy.  On the other hand, we will need to address the components of our industrial economy that remain dependent on fossil fuels for production processes.  Conceding that we might not be best suited to impose one-size-fits-all solutions to relieve particular firms of their dependence on fossil fuels, we are bullish on the idea of instituting markets for carbon use credits, especially if can collaborate with other like-minded state and provincial governments across North America to develop consolidated carbon use markets that will jointly push us toward the goal of managing reductions fossil fuel utilization in industry over time.  The operation of such consolidated markets in carbon credits might also have the benefit of enabling the development of consolidated, inter-jurisdictional funds for long term ecological planning by member governments, assuming we will jointly manage the creation, marketing, and progressive retirement of credits.

Moving beyond ecological concerns directly impinging on the theme of carbon emissions, we affirm our support for a number of larger initiatives to protect nature in relation to human existence.  To the extent that we are willing to hand the sovereign governments of every state the authority to either enforce or negate the terms of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, we are determined to apply rigorous protection of species within our Commonwealth that have been identified as threatened or endangered with extinction, and we will act to encourage our countrymen in all of the other states to do the same.  The progress of the biological sciences, taken in relation to the broader structure of ecological change in the present global context, has evidently demonstrated to us that we will have to incorporate a broader vision on the protection of individual species, configuring elements of flora and fauna into ecosystemic structures that must be protected as a totality in order for each element within these structures to remain vital and secure in its existence.  The loss of an apex predator in a particular ecosystem may, thus, lead to overpopulation of prey with attendant consequences for the maintenance of adequate food sources for a range of animal species and for the protection of diverse plant species within the ecosystem.  Any efforts on our part to protect the well being of endangered species in our Commonwealth must, therefore, incorporate the most expansive biological understanding of ecosystemic maintenance.  Proceeding from such an understanding of the broader mandate to protect ecosystems, embraced both by the ESA and the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), we are hopeful that our sovereign countrymen will similarly find the arguments of science persuasive and compelling as an impetus to protect their natural environments and to cooperate in global efforts to achieve these ends for the entire natural world.

As noted above, we would support the continuity of federal enforcement of universal standards protecting the safety of water supplies for citizens in each of the states, however, we will prepare to develop our own standards on the protection of clean water resources in the Commonwealth.  If we anticipate a moderate but steady growth of the population of Massachusetts over time, then we will see moderate rising demand for potable water resources, especially for our cities.  In this regard, we will be especially mindful of significantly scaled water resources, like the Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs, to ensure that hydration levels remain sufficient to meet demand and that we protect supplies both from the risks of industrial contamination and from intentional malicious efforts to adulterate clean water, including terrorist actions.  Moreover, we will support efforts to promote and intensify water conservation and entrepreneurial initiatives to re-conceptualize water treatment in the interest of expanding potable water supplies by recycling systemic resources.  That is to say, the more that we are able to retain supplies of fully treated potable water for reuse within particular municipal water systems, the less we will deplete aquifer and reservoir-based resources.  Projects in this direction will, doubtless, introduce complexities into water supply structures, but we are confident that innovation will buffer the resiliency of our water supply systems over time.  

  

As we argued above, it is our intention to privilege a comprehensive reconsideration of human settlement patterns across Massachusetts, realizing a larger conception of intensive urbanism.  Even as the population of our Commonwealth expands, we will consign a larger and larger share of our land space to uses other than residential settlement, in the interest of preserving green space and expanding land available to ecologically and economically sustainable agricultural production.  Such a transformation in settlement patterns will, invariably, have numerous positive virtues but will introduce a wide range of negatives and unforeseen problems to be negotiated.  As we have suggested, waste disposal and treatment will be high on our list of problems that we will certainly confront moving forward with a more intensively urbanized Massachusetts.  It simply will not do for us to crowd large populations into our cities alongside mountains of accumulating garbage.  We hope to stimulate a range of entrepreneurial ideas on the reuse and recycling of diverse components of our existing waste stream.  And we will advance ideas, like reusable food containers, oriented toward the total elimination of particular forms of waste.  Succinctly, we will commit to eschew the impulse of loading our trash and erstwhile recyclables on ships bound for the developing world to pollute and diminish the quality of life of less favored corners of common humanity.  On the other hand, it is certain that every great idea in the future will create a number of unforeseen challenges that we will be compelled to confront in their own time and under their own contextual circumstances.  At a moment in time when we have only begun to envision a world beyond the partisan sclerosis of our existing Constitutional context, we simply cannot codify a coherent blueprint of plans to address problems in the distant future that we cannot even fathom today.  Rather, we can commit to move forward into the unknown with ardent hopes for the success of a courageous project to be borne by every citizen of this Commonwealth in the name of brighter future in a more sustainable, post-carbon world.  

The Common Continental Defense

We have acknowledged that the collective responsibility for defense of the continental United States and external spaces, including the state of Hawaii and the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa, against threats to national security will remain firmly in the hands of the federal government.  Over two hundred years of history in the establishment of the federal government as the repository of the common defense for every American state has sufficiently proven to us that we, in Massachusetts, can do no better in defending ourselves from external military threats than to rely overwhelmingly on the unified military service community of the United States.  Conversely, the current scale and organizational structure of the military service components as they presently exist raise questions for us, as do the present collection of foreign service deployments and international military missions undertaken by the United States, in the name of all its citizens under the presumption that the sacrifice of American lives and of American public finances is essential to the long term defense of this country.  Precisely, our considerations here seek to come to terms with our standpoint on the future of the US military, as a collective institution principally at the disposal of the federal government, and of the national defense elements to be retained under the authority of each of the states, principally under the rubric of the National Guard system.  Moreover, we need to address the current military commitments of the United States and to assess their long term importance to the national security of this country.  We will consider the doctrinal deployment of military forces in particular theaters of operation and the development of rules of engagement for US military forces in theater.  Finally, we need to clarify the lines of command and control over armed forces, including elements of the US military engaged in international missions in divergent geographic theaters of operation and the various components of strategic nuclear forces.  

At the outset, we have a very basic and essential set of concerns to elaborate.  Specifically, for what purposes do we, on a national scale, need a military?  What threats confront the United States?  What is the nature of these threats?  How do we propose to confront each threat that faces the country?  In conjunction with these concerns, how much of an onus can we sensibly consign to the work the United States diplomatic community, focused on the US State Department?  In what way is the success of the diplomatic community prefigured on the capacity to levy military force as a threat and as a deterrent against opposing threats?  Is there a meaningful role to be exercised by uniformed and civilian clandestine and intelligence services (e.g. the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)) in conjunction with both the diplomatic community and the military? If the future international political engagement of the United States, as a union of sovereign states, is to demonstrate a substantial degree of coherence, stability, and ethical fortitude, then it is bound to reflect a continuous consensual interplay between the work of the citizens' representatives in Congress, the exercise of professional expertise by high level executive administrators and, in particular, the office of the President, as Chief Diplomat and Commander-in-Chief, the everyday operations of the broader diplomatic community, the continuously vigilant efforts of the uniformed and civilian intelligence communities, and the constant maintenance of the readiness and lethality of each of the uniformed military components, as the default mechanism through which the United States, as a whole, will be capable of enforcing its will against foreign entities that challenge our national security.  

It is indisputable to us that Congress will have to be fully engaged in the process of foreign policy development and in any decision to deploy federal military forces in any and every conceivable foreign theater of operations.  Insofar as we comprehend the necessity of maintaining a ready military threat against all possible foreign threats to the national security of the United States, the decision to utilize military forces must continuously remain under the expressed consent of the citizens' representatives.  The Founders conferred the enumerated Constitutional power to declare war in the exclusive hands of Congress.  In our time, we intend to see that this extension of power has meaning and force against the unchecked exercise of discretion in the foreign deployment of military forces by the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.  In this regard, acknowledging, in particular, the time sensitivity of decisions to intervene militarily in certain international contexts, it seems clear that mechanisms need to be developed through which, minimally, a multi-partisan subset (e.g. the Chair and ranking minority member) of the Armed Services committees of each house of Congress can be rapidly and securely briefed on intentions for the use of military force by the Office of the President in advance of any foreign military action conducted in the interest of national security.  The details of such briefings need to be rigorously specified with regard to the scale of military forces to be utilized and the expected time frame for operations, assessment of opposing threat forces, both military and para-military, to be engaged, estimations of potential collateral damage to non-military structures and civilian casualties, assessment of potential international political impacts, and evaluation of potential impacts to overall readiness of US military forces in the subject theater of operations.  In the absence of such information sharing prior to the utilization of military forces, moreover, we would be satisfied to hold the Office of the President at fault for exercising recklessness in the execution of its role as Commander-in-Chief sufficient to find the President in contempt of Congress and potentially subject to the impeachment process.  Beyond the mere timely sharing of information, we would hold that Congress should have an active, preemptive role in steering foreign policy and in advising or otherwise preemptively authorizing the utilization of military force in very precise and well defined terms.  If we have our way, then there will never be another excessively broad Congressional extension of authorization for the use of military force comparable to the one passed on September 18, 2001 in the aftermath of the September 11,2001 attacks.  On the other hand, we would support active and preemptive drafting of Congressional directives to the Office of the President authorizing and advising the use of military force in particular geographic contexts, against particular foreign adversaries, when such actions appear to both serve the long term global strategic interests of the United States and appear to manifest little risk of substantial escalatory action against American assets or American citizens, and when the Office of the President has demonstrated resistance to the utilization of military force in such contexts.  If the duty to serve as primary executor to the will of the wider American populace in summoning the use of military force on its behalf befalls Congress, then we will act accordingly whether or not the Office of the President concedes its necessity.  Minimally, the Office of the President cannot be left exclusively to its own devices in formulating foreign policy, generally, or in determining the appropriate conditions for the utilization of military force in the interest of the United States.  

We recognize that the Office of the President will retain its role as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, but, as we have suggested, we need to qualify and restructure this role.  The President cannot be left to act as if its role was equivalent to that of a divisional or battalion level Army field commander, an Air Force flight commander, or a Navy destroyer captain such that the President should be authorized to intervene in the operational minutia of the armed forces.  At most, the President is capable of intervening in the formulation and execution of grand strategy, in directing the highest echelons of the uniformed military to undertake specific upper level operational plans oriented to achieve a range of largely political objectives.  We understand that the nuts and bolts of such upper level operational plans will be left entirely to the uniformed services and that they will be largely insulated from political concerns in the interest of concentrating on efficacy, on the efficient utilization of the tools and manpower necessary to complete the assigned missions of the tasked military units.  If either the Office of the President or the civilian executive leadership over the uniformed services in the Department of Defense actively intervened, as a matter of course, in the day-to-day operational matters of individual military units, then our Constitutional structure of civilian oversight over the armed forces would be utterly dysfunctional.  Uniformed military leadership must be left to govern itself, contingent, of course, on the recognition that the overall operational employment of military forces conforms to the grand strategic direction of civilian executive leadership and the day-to-day operations of military units and the actions of military personnel conform to the legal restrictions outlined in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

Critically, as we have argued, the organization and utilization of strategic nuclear forces are different from those of every other components of the uniformed military forces, and we will insist that they are treated differently and that the present organization of strategic nuclear forces be scrapped, root and stem.  We will support the immediate removal of exclusive authority to execute utilization orders from the Office of the President on the grounds that the danger posed by leaving exclusive authority to utilize strategic nuclear weapons in the hands of a single individual is too great to allow such a situation to continue.  Furthermore, in conflating the operational role of the Commander-in-Chief with the authority to issue execution orders for the use of strategic nuclear weapons, we are concerned that any residual capacity of the Office of the President to directly access the strategic nuclear arsenal will undermine broader control over this set of military assets if only because the President would be able to exercise excessive influence over other individuals tasked with overall control over strategic nuclear assets.  These assets and the capacity to deliver execution orders must be completely separated from the Office of the President, and the authority to deliver execution orders must be pluralized.  We would support the creation of a commission of, at most, thirty-five individuals, a majority of which would be composed uniformed military personnel.  The military and civilian members of this commission would be appointed by the Office of the President and subject to the approval of the Senate and would serve fixed terms not exceeding four years, not subject to removal except through the impeachment process.  This commission would be exclusively tasked to permanently and continuously stand as the sole authority to deliver execution orders for the various components of the strategic nuclear arsenal.  In the event that conditions exist that might merit the delivery of execution orders, a duty subset of five members of the commission, three uniformed and two civilian, would be tasked to determine whether execution orders should be issued, and the delivery of such orders should be effected if at least four out of five members on duty concur that orders must be issued.  

Beyond the organizational structure for delivery of execution orders, we will elaborate our other concerns regarding the strategic nuclear arsenal, as a collective set of weapons of last resort, separately.  Alternatively, the tactical use of battlefield nuclear weapons raises other problems.  The US military clearly manifests a ready capacity to deliver battlefield nuclear weapons, with yields in the range between .5 and 2 kilotons, in a wide range of operational contexts, and there are evidently a number of theaters of operation in which their inclusion within operational planning may be merited.  To the extent that we recognize this point, it raises the question of whether the continued involvement of US forces in these theaters remains vital to the long term strategic interests of the United States or whether we should begin the withdrawal of US forces from these theaters, minimally, in the interest of never confronting the likelihood that we will have to employ even low-yield nuclear weapons.  In particular, is the continued involvement of US military forces in the defense of the Republic of Korea a sufficiently vital subject for US foreign policy that it would behoove us to continue stationing nuclear capable units and weapons systems in or near the Republic of Korea?  Emphatically, we do not know the answer to this question, but is is clearly worth asking and it is worth thoroughly considering every circumstance in which the utilization of nuclear weapons by US forces might emerge from an otherwise conventional military flashpoint.

The present forward deployment of US military units in a wide range of foreign theaters of operation significantly raises concerns for us.  Foremost among these concerns is the continuous engagement of US and allied NATO forces in Afghanistan.  We recognize that the inception of US operations in this country in 2001, as a response to the material support afforded by the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan toward the Salafist Al Qaeda network in the lead up to the September 11, 2001 attacks, may have constituted a reasonable response to the particular geopolitical alignment of a globally capable non-state militant organization.  On the other hand, our success in temporarily deposing the Taliban movement in its efforts to seize and maintain political power over Afghanistan have demonstrated a basic and insoluble problem for the United States.  Notwithstanding our apparent negotiation of an agreement to cease hostilities between the US and NATO-allied contingents and Taliban forces, it is sufficiently clear that the Taliban movement has no meaningful intention to bargain in good faith with the present, US-backed government of Afghanistan in order to secure its political integration into a multi-partisan government.  Without the leverage afforded by US military involvement, the present government of Afghanistan lacks and will perpetually lack the capacity to achieve peace with the Taliban movement short of accepting conditions which would amount to capitulation and open the door to a return of full Taliban rule over the country in short order.  Emphatically, the United States has been here before, and if we readily acknowledge that Afghanistan cannot be reduced to a permanent Central Asian US protectorate, then it is worth asking what we need to do in this context to minimize the damage that will be effected once the Taliban fully return to power, especially in relation to the lives and well being of thousands of Afghans who collaborated with us in the hopes that their country might be turning a corner from several generations of violence after the initial defeat of the Taliban.  We need to acknowledge that our effort to resuscitate Afghanistan as a site for liberal governance and reintegration into the multi-lateral community of nations on our terms has failed and that the best that we can hope to achieve at this point is to orchestrate a programmed withdrawal of US forces, perhaps over two to three years, with an invitation to relocate as much of the impending Afghan refugee diaspora as we can in the United States and across other accepting destination states in the West.  Such a programmed withdrawal might, in turn, necessitate a short run build up of US forces in theater and a return to limited offensive operations against Taliban forces with the intent of stabilizing the partisan balance in certain central areas of the country in the near term.  It would also, certainly, involve short run logistical support for regional actors in particular, strategically defensible peripheral provinces, especially in the north, that might constitute a long term obstacle to complete Taliban rule over the entire country.  Perhaps a permanent partitioning of the country into a set of regional ethno-national jurisdictions, with the clear intentions to maintain political and military support for new regional ethno-national governments in which internal opposition to the Taliban movement and Pashtun ethnic domination is robust and capable of being adequately marshaled to effect, might satisfactorily thwart Taliban efforts to establish a Salafist state across the entire country.  Conversely, we should commit to vigilance in policing any evident return of militant non-state Salafist forces to safe havens in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, in the interest of ensuring that no attacks on the continental United States will ever be planned or orchestrated again from the territory of this country.

The mix of operational deployments, clandestine operations, and countries of strategic interest to the national security of the United States, as it is currently defined, in the Central Command (CENTCOM) theater of operations, encompassing the western Indian Ocean basin including the entirety of  Southwest Asia, is most concerning to us as we consider how American global defense policy needs to change.  It is evident that Iran will remain a going concern to both the foreign diplomatic and defense community for some time to come, whether or not the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in restraint of Iranian nuclear development returns into effect on both Iran and the United States, if only because Iran remains in the cross hairs of both Saudi Arabia and Israel.  For our part, having acknowledged the lingering importance of Afghanistan as an element in US national security policy, we are concerned both with the assemblage of diplomatic and defense-oriented alliance structures supported by the US in Southwest Asia and the effect of these alliances on US defense organization, planning, and operations.  Minimally, the semi-permanent forward deployment of US forces in, among other locations, Bahrain, headquarters of the Navy's Fifth fleet, is evocative of a degree of pernicious entanglement in the political affairs of states in Southwest Asia that we find extremely disconcerting, threatening, and utterly inconsistent with our image of the American global presence in a world restructured against a revival of the sovereignty of the states.  If we have our way, no permanent or semi-permanent forward deployment of US forces will exist in the Persian Gulf area of operations, and the Central Command, as such, will be reorganized as the blanket joint force command structure to transitionally manage temporary forward deployments to Southwest Asia, most critically in reference to logistical maintenance, and to undertake contingency planning for warfare in Southwest Asia from locations inside the continental United States.  It will be a organizational skeleton deprived of flesh and organs unless and until they are needed to undertake operations in Southwest Asia expressly at the consent and direction of Congress.

More generally, if a return to the sovereignty of the states is to have any meaning with respect to foreign and defense policy for the federal government of the United States, then it must imply a minimization of active engagement in defensive alliance structures to activities that command overwhelming support across all of the states, evident through a super-majority of support in Congress.  The Office of the President, in its roles as Chief Diplomat and Commander-in-Chief, must be placed on a very short leash, and the organizational structure of the Defense Department must evoke the imposition of such limitations by the states through Congress.  In this regard, we would reconsider whether forward deployment of joint operational commands anywhere outside of the United States is merited.  Does EUCOM headquarters still belong in Stuttgart, Germany, notwithstanding our continued participation in the NATO alliance?  Evidently, the answer to this question resides in how we envision our continued involvement in NATO and our responsibilities to other member states in the North Atlantic alliance.  And, acknowledging the possible global strategic importance of continued defensive alliances with the Republic of Korea and Japan, is it fundamentally necessary for US military forces to maintain permanent forward deployments in these countries?  In these terms, we must recognize that the particular way in which we deploy military forces around the globe effectively constitutes an argument, in itself, as to how we should undertake foreign policy writ large.  The lives and well being of American military members and the investments made by US tax payers to provide the tools necessary for military units to perform their missions in forward deployed locations shape the way that we approach the various corners of the world in which our forces are operating even as we reframe the nature of the missions to which our forces are tasked.  In Massachusetts, we will never be the truly sovereign masters of our own affairs until we subordinate the organization and deployment of the US military to the firm and deliberate control of the states through Congress.  Foreign policy, in general, and defense policy, in particular, will be crafted and executed in our interest rather than propelled to function for its own sake according to some logic disconnected from the immediate consent of our citizens.  

In specific reference to the status of US military operations in defense of the Republic of Korea, it is our position that the sovereign integrity of the Republic of Korea is a matter of importance not only for the United States and for its neighbors in Japan and in the People's Republic of China but for the entire world.  We acknowledge that the pernicious division of the Korean peninsula between the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the continuity of a formal state of war between these two states, coupled with the aggressive efforts of the DPRK to not only maintain a substantial percentage of its population under arms but to develop a long range offensive nuclear arsenal, elevates the importance of American military support for the ROK.  Conversely, we question the necessity of permanently stationing ground and air units in the ROK and, in particular, the garrisoning of posts along the demilitarized zone separating the ROK from the DPRK.  The United States cannot pursue a permanent role as the default guarantor of peace between two combatant states, especially in a corner of the world increasingly subject to the burgeoning military strength and political influence of the People's Republic of China.  We would not abandon our allies in the ROK to external domination from Beijing, but we have to acknowledge that power relations on the western edge of the Pacific basin are evolving and that China indisputably deserves its place at the table in establishing a permanent resolution of an ongoing Korean conflict in its own backyard.  In the end, we cannot freeze the present constellation of political and military relations on the Korean peninsula and in its immediate surroundings in place, especially under circumstances in which the abject poverty of a majority of the population of the DPRK renders it a rampant source of regional political instability and a potential flash point for both conventional and nuclear warfare.  We support the negotiation of a permanent peace treaty between the Korean states, prefigured on the principle that each state recognizes the permanent sovereignty of its peninsular neighbor and the permanent division of the peninsula, that no conditionalities are made on either the political or economic systems in place in the DPRK, that the ROK commits to extend a fixed quantity of annual financial support for economic development in the DPRK, in conformity with the centrally planned mechanisms in place within the DPRK, for a fixed number of years in exchange for major reductions in DPRK military expenditures on conventional forces and the categorical elimination of its nuclear arsenal under international verification, and that we advance commitments to begin a permanent withdrawal of all US military ground and air forces from the Korean peninsula.  It is time for the Korean war to finally end and for the two Koreas to live in peace and mutual security.

 

Beyond these reflections on the current state of US military operations in the wider world, where does the National Guard system, organizationally linked to each individual state, fit within our imagery of a restructured military?  Similarly, where do the other reserve components logically fit in relation to both the active duty federal military components and the National Guard system?  These questions pose important political problems and complexities for us, and we will attempt to address these matters decisively in turn.  Each state National Guard belongs exclusively to the citizens of its state, to be deployed at will in accordance with the needs of citizens at the behest of the state governments under the direct authority of the offices of Governor through the state Adjutant General.  We recognize that, in times of extreme need and crisis affecting the country as a whole, National Guard forces might become temporally federalized and subject to the command of active duty military forces and direct authority of the Office of the President.  However, we need to rigorously codify the conditions under which such a transference of authority might take place.  National Guard units cannot be organized, even provisionally, as adjuncts or reserve elements to active duty command structures.  A National Guard ground/Army engineers company in Georgia, for example, should not be included within the reserve organizational structure of the US Army 82nd Airborne Division, because such an inclusion would imply the default subordination of state control over the National Guard by federal military forces as a condition of existence for the Guard.  Emphatically, the National Guard in each state should be deliberately reorganized by each state to expressly secure the civil and military defensive needs determined by each state government, and, henceforth, the National Guard in each state should be explicitly and exclusively financed by the state government except under satisfaction of the conditions through which the Guard might be temporarily federalized by Congress.  Each state National Guard should internally train its own personnel, including all new recruits, and enter into training relationships with federal military forces only to the extent that such cooperative projects are required in order to better secure the larger role of individual National Guard units within regional and/or contingency national defense planning.  In this regard, we would concede that National Guard Air units might substantially engage in cross-training with active duty federal US Air Force units in order to standardize procedures involving multiple National Guard units across multiple states tasked for the purposes of continental air defense, a mission explicitly conducive to federal or even international direction (i.e. NORAD).  Moreover, we would favorably envision the possibility of cross-training among National Guard units of multiple states, especially under circumstances where joint defense planning between state National Guard organizations, whether or not orchestrated through the aegis of the federal government, made such collaboration conducive to the needs of each state.  On a more basic level, it might be worth considering whether state National Guard units should be internally reorganized in such a way that grades, ranks, and operational specialty designations/military occupational specialties no longer strictly coincide with those of the federal military components.  Such a reorganization would be merited if it explicitly forged a breakage with the misnomer that National Guard units are internal organizational subordinates of federal military forces.  We want such a federalist fallacy to disappear in a world in which the states are sovereign and where the National Guards are exclusive subjects to the will of the states.  

For our part, we would envision a Massachusetts National Guard structure reshaped by our broader vision of universal compulsory public service.  If we succeed in establishing such a structure of public work, then we intend to staff the National Guard with annual cohorts of new recruits from a diverse subset of secondary school graduates across the Commonwealth.  We acknowledge, in this respect, that not every secondary school graduate will want to enter into military service for the Commonwealth and, further, we recognize that not every individual is conducive to the sort of discipline required of military recruits.  Young citizens deserve a diverse range of options in public service, including service in a military capacity.  Those who select to enter military service for the Commonwealth will undergo basic combat training and specialty training locally under the direction of National Guard training staff.  To the extent that further training by federal military personnel is warranted, we will temporarily transfer personnel into the direction of federal military training units to complete their learning and military indoctrination.  They will then be assigned to active duty National Guard units for a mandatory period of up to two years and a subsequent reserve service commitment of up to four years, although we will certainly give personnel who have completed active duty the option to continue active service provided the need for fully trained personnel presents itself.  In return for completion of mandatory service requirements, our National Guard members will earn the right to receive lifetime universal basic income payments, although we will continue to evaluate when and how such individuals can contribute further public service in a non-military capacity as they enter into civilian life.  

We will do our utmost to annually establish the personnel needs of each unit within our National Guard system as new recruits are added, older non-commissioned officers, warrant officers, and commissioned command officers separate from service, and as the broader mission of our National Guard as a whole evolves, continuously if indirectly considered against the backdrop of changes in the operations and organization of federal military forces.  We, additionally, envision the possibilities of voluntary enlistment from slightly older age cohorts and, in particular, transitioning of federal military personnel into National Guard positions, especially into leadership positions.  We envision a Massachusetts National Guard, composed of Army/ground and Air units, with a substantial permanent active duty presence and a secondary element of reserve personnel, serving regularly and periodically in addition to their regular civilian occupations.  The Office of the Adjutant General, as the overall joint-force uniformed commander of the National Guard, will, further, maintain a permanent central planning apparatus, in collaboration with federal military forces and National Guard organizations from other states, to develop operational plans for the defense of the Commonwealth and to contribute to the defense of our neighbors under the consent of their citizens exercised through the active engagement of their governments. 

Our approach to the National Guard system raises the broader issue of reserve component military forces.  As we have outlined, our imagery for the future of the Massachusetts National Guard has a prominent place for a permanent active duty service presence within our National Guard units, supplemented by part-time reserve forces.  Emphatically, our National Guard will never be characterized as a cohort of week-end warriors; they will constitute a professional military force permanently under arms in the defense of their neighbors and fellow citizens, supplemented in turn by regularly trained and periodically activated reserve members.  Succinctly, we will treat our National Guard primarily as an active duty military force, to be utilized and deployed as an active duty force.  We do not know how the other states will approach their National Guard forces, but we are hopeful that attitudes will be similar to ours.  

The status of the federal military force reserve components, however, represents another matter.  If, in some manner, National Guard Army/ground and Air forces enjoy some logical connection to the civil and military defense needs of their states, then the connection of Naval and Marine reserve component units, especially in the interior continental states, to state defensive needs is much less clear.  Similarly, Air Force Reserve units engaged in such missions as heavy global air mobility lack a logical connection to the defensive needs of the states.  It is our opinion that any Reserve designation for the latter is strictly a misnomer.  The need for federal military forces to maintain global air mobility is a continuous imperative for active duty forces, and large numbers of the personnel in Reserve units performing these duties are continuously active.  In these regards, it seems clear to us that the active/reserve dichotomy across both the federal and National Guard forces has been badly framed, and it merits being discarded.  In certain cases, where a clear local/regional defense mission can be formulated for federal reserve component units, it might be worthwhile transferring such units wholesale into the National Guard system and reorganizing them in conformity with the structure of their states' National Guards.  In other cases, where reserve units clearly serve a critical federal mission, they should be reconfigured as designated active duty federal forces, even to the extent that some of the personnel in these units will nominally be reservists.  We acknowledge that, in certain circumstances, it might seem efficacious for the US Navy or the Marine Corps to maintain reserve units in inland states for the restricted purposes of maintaining well trained reserve personnel, but we are dubious of the effectiveness of such a theoretic organization of reserve forces, for the Navy, the Marine Corps, or even for certain units of the Army reserve.  Is it even possible that reserve Navy personnel in rural Minnesota could be effectively trained in surface vessel air defense screening operations for a carrier strike force one weekend a month from a computer simulator over one thousand miles from port?  Emphatically, if the federal military forces are going to maintain reserve components, then the personnel included within these reserves need to be continuously integrated and engaged with active duty forces in such a manner that every reservist is fully capable of being called into service at a moment's notice to do their jobs as if they were always active duty members.  In the absence of such a capacity, the reserve components are a waste of resources for the federal military forces and should be scrapped.

A wide array of questions quite evidently face us, both at the level of the federal military forces and at that of our National Guard system, regarding ongoing technological change in the deployment of capacities for lethal violence and, most especially, the utilization of artificial intelligence.  Many on the political left harbor all too evident fears regarding the potential for the use of lethal force by means of automated technologies, citing in particular the use of drones in a wide range of combat and special operations environments.  We, emphatically, do not share such concerns.  Rather, we recognize that warfare will increasingly become a field for rapid integration of artificial intelligence, and we intend to ensure that both the federal military forces of the United States and the National Guard system of Massachusetts will increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence in our operations.  In a world where artificial intelligence exists as a potential to be utilized by a range of our potential foreign adversaries, including the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China, we cannot afford to forswear the utilization of non-human means for the deployment of lethal violence in our own defense and in that of our allies.  Drones, both under the remote control of human agents and propelled under independent learning and adaptation dynamics/algorithms, will constitute components in the future deployed forces of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  We will commit resources to develop artificial intelligence programs for air, ground, and naval warfare, safe in the knowledge that our potential opponents are doing the same.  Moreover, we will also, certainly, commit resources to develop technologies intended to interdict the utilization of battlefield artificial intelligence by our adversaries.  In these regards, we recognize that future wars will increasingly be fought by mixes of human military forces and automated components and that we will need to adjust over time to the changing nature of military confrontation and to assure an optimal capacity for command and control of all deployed forces at our disposal in future conflict.  

   

Emphatically, there are a number of questions that we have regarding the appropriate level of strength for federal military forces necessary to effect a convincing continental defense and to adequately defend our non-continental American possession, including the state of Hawaii.  We will certainly never possess adequate numbers of naval vessels to completely police our territorial waters against alien incursions.  As thoroughly as we can maintain surveillance of airspace via ground radar and satellite systems, we cannot continuously police our airspace against every conceivable threat.  As comprehensive as any mid-range or terminal stage missile defense system can be structured, we cannot develop an all-encompassing missile defense network to render every inch of the continental United States safe from the risk of an intercontinental ballistic missile strike against our sovereign soil.  In the end, we will reconfigure the organization, doctrinal deployment patterns, and mix of technologies available to the federal military forces continuously over time to provide the most effective structure of defensive forces that we can muster.  We will continuously reevaluate the nature of threats facing the United States as a whole and do our best to ensure that our federal military forces can counter new threats emerging against our national security, including those emerging from non-state militant organizations.  And, at the level of the states, we will see to it that our National Guard forces are fully capable of engaging in defensive operations to protect our sovereign soil and to support our neighbors when we are called upon to do so.  On the other hand, in the future, military planning and finance, through Congress, will simply look different than it does now.  It will be more constrained.  It will proceed from an evident privileging of continental defense over globally extensive mission engagement.  We will have a more subdued role to play in our alliance structures.  Certain forward deployed commands will be eliminated outright.  Others will be resituated to operate with reduced non-contingency responsibilities on US soil to plan for the eventuality of contingency operations.  We will organize decisively to protect our possessions even as we continue to hold the capacity to support our allies globally.  More generally, the engagement of the United States with the world, as a whole and for each individual sovereign state, will change, and the prominence of the American soldier as its representative emblem will fade into the background in favor of diplomacy, multilateral discourse and agreement, and confidence in the unity of common humanity, structured both through economic connections and the free movement of people and culture.        

The Nuclear Triad 

Adamantly, we support the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.  In this manner, we hold hopes that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, passed in 2017 by the U.N. General Assembly, will constitute the basis for discussion on how existing nuclear arsenals can be gradually and permanently dismantled.  Conversely, we understand that the United States cannot unilaterally engage in nuclear disarmament without agreements from potential nuclear adversaries to similarly dismantle their own nuclear arsenals.  The enduring logic of mutually assured destruction continues to guide our national security policy around the maintenance of our offensive strategic nuclear capabilities.  If we cannot expose ourselves to the threat of total destruction without the capacity to inflict a similar fate to a nuclear adversary, then it is clear that the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China, and other states in possession of strategic nuclear capabilities similarly cannot afford to expose themselves to the threat of nuclear destruction without the ability to retaliate.  Nuclear disarmament will happen someday, but it will be a long road forged by intensive diplomacy, configured on the principles of mutual respect for the sovereignty of individual nuclear states, the centrality of multilateral resolution of international disputes, and respect for the sanctity of common humanity and its place within the broader ecology of the planet.  Until we have succeeded in eliminating all nuclear weapons, we recognize that, as a practical matter, the United States will continue to invest in the maintenance of its strategic nuclear arsenal, in updating obsolete weapons and delivery systems, and in developing more effective continental defensive structures that might marginally enhance the survivability of the US population and better enable strategic nuclear forces to successfully deliver a retaliatory strike against preemptive action by a potential nuclear adversary.

The status of the strategic nuclear arsenal, to the exclusion of tactical/battlefield grade weapons systems, raises a number of issues for us.  First, as we have argued above, we will insist that the structure of authority for delivery of orders for employment of the strategic nuclear arsenal be transformed and pluralized.  We will exclude the Office of President, as Commander-in-Chief, from decisions on the use of the strategic nuclear arsenal and transfer this authority to a civilian and uniformed military commission, to be continuously sequestered in a safe and secret location for the purpose of executing orders for the delivery of strategic nuclear weapons under contingencies that Congress may embark on articulating but may otherwise be left to the discretion of those officials with whom we would entrust the authority to decide under what circumstances the mere existence of life on the planet might be brought to the brink of total annihilation.  As we have argued, we certainly do not take such decisions lightly, and we will ensure that such a commission be staffed with sober, reliable, and conservative servants to the will of the American people.  

With regard to the particular components of the strategic nuclear arsenal, we support the continued utilization of the ground-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) arms of the strategic nuclear triad.  Conversely, we would question the continued vitality of the bomber arm.  Considering the costs of maintaining a range of delivery and weapons systems for use in the bomber arm, including the B-52H, B-1, and B-2 bomber systems and diverse nuclear capable weapons systems like the AGM-86 air-launched cruise missile system, and, further, considering the range of adversarial defensive systems specifically targeting bombers and air-launched weapons systems, we question the efficacy of continuing to expend scarce financial resources on redundant and likely obsolescent delivery systems.  Moreover, every penny expended by the United States in preserving one offensive arm of the nuclear triad or another necessitates that nuclear adversaries spend resources to develop countermeasures in order to reduce the efficacy of the weapons systems of each arm.  We acknowledge, in this respect, that such a reality might constitute a palpable argument for investing more resources across all elements of the nuclear triad rather than less, but, on the other hand, we would seek to pursue the converse perspective that investing less will enable every nuclear power to divert financial resources away from the development of technologies necessary to fight a doomsday war that we all would presume and pray never to see.  We will support the permanent retirement of our strategic bomber forces and of the weapons systems associated with this arm of the nuclear triad, with reassignment of certain components of the strategic bomber forces for contingent tactical/operational roles (especially B-2 stealth aircraft squadrons), and we will concentrate investments in our strategic nuclear forces in the ICBM and SLBM components.

We will support the planned replacement of the existing arsenal of Minuteman III ICBMs in our ground-based strategic nuclear forces with next generation ICBM systems, designed to potentially accommodate five or more independently targetable re-entry vehicles with warheads of comparable yields to the present design specifications of the W87-1 (approximately 450 kt).  The fielding of such systems will, obviously, be predicated on the continued negotiation and compliance with international treaties on the management and reduction of total nuclear arsenals between the United States, the Russian Federation, and other nuclear powers and on the need to deploy a highly dispersed, survivable missile force.  If the currently existing force of Minuteman III missiles now numbers around 450, then we would assume that next generation weapons would not be reduced to anything less than 300 separately siloed weapons platforms.  Moreover, while we are confident that missile designers will successfully realize effective next generation models that fully incorporate the need to maintain a highly viable ICBM deterrent threat, we would certainly emphasize our hopes that full considerations regarding adequate propulsion, payload size/weight, targetable range, and guidance/targeting flexibility be incorporated into the Minuteman III's successor.  Finally, we evidently need to consider integration of ground-based anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems into networks concentrated in proximity to ICBM silo facilities in order to better facilitate the survivability of ICBMs against an initial and unanticipated adversarial strike and enable the capacity for a rigorous land-based retaliatory response.  Such terminal stage defensive measures may not be perfect in any sense, but to whatever degree they augment the survivability of our ICBM forces they would enhance the capabilities of our larger strategic nuclear forces and compel potential adversaries to invest in more sophisticated measures to defeat our ABM systems.  

       

We remain confident in the capabilities of the UGM-133A Trident II SLBM system to constitute the workhorse of our submarine-based strategic nuclear deterrent threat, and we will remain mindful of circumstances that might require changes to the deployment of our SLBM arsenal, including the progressive aging of the Ohio class SSBN force and the continued need to maintain a supporting force of fast attack subs, both in SSBN escort and threat interdiction roles.  In these regards, we acknowledge that changes in the doctrinal deployment and technological capacities of our undersea nuclear capable forces will drive our abilities to extend global nuclear deterrence at least as much as our land-based ICBM capacities and that the diversity of weapons packages that can be delivered by the Trident II, as well as improvements in weapons targeting and accuracy, make it an ideal centerpiece for our larger strategic nuclear arsenal.  Similarly, the continued improvement of the SSN fast-attack force, with the ongoing introduction of new Virginia class ships equipped with an extensive array of anti-ship weapons, will improve the overall survivability of our SSBN forces to ensure that we can continuously maintain a ready undersea nuclear threat.  For the present term, we will continue to support the development and maintenance of our mobile SLBM platforms and of the supporting naval elements critical to the performance of their roles in broader strategic nuclear deterrence.

    

In concluding this section, we need to emphasize the importance of maintain rigorous early warning structures against adversarial strategic nuclear threats and to integrate such early warning structures into a broader system of defenses, including ground-based interceptor aircraft, surface-to-air batteries, and mid-course and terminal stage anti-ballistic missile systems.  We will continue to invest substantial support in joint US-Canadian cooperation in the North American Air Defense (NORAD) structure, and we will seek to improve quick-response integration between 1st Air Force air defense/interceptor units and other elements of continental air defense to ensure that any palpable threat for the use of strategic nuclear weapons against any US territories will be met with an immediate defensive response.  We acknowledge, as such, that investments in our defense and survivability will compel our adversaries to invest more heavily in their own offensive capabilities, and, in the longer term, as every nuclear power recognizes the counterproductive logic of such investments, relative to every other conceivable manifestation of public investment, we are hopeful that the pointless logic of investing in doomsday warfare will progressively undermine its rationale, leading to the permanent elimination of nuclear weapons.  In the meantime, this Commonwealth will tangibly support any effort to extend the terms of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to the US, to our NATO allies, to the Russian Federation, to the People's Republic of China, and to every other nuclear power and aspirant on the planet.  The day will come when we will have either arrived at a world without the scourge of impending nuclear annihilation or we will confront a world brought to the precipice of the universal extinction of all life by our own hands.   

NATO and the International Treaty Structures

In numerous ways, the Twentieth century was an exceptional moment for the United States as a globally-scaled actor.  The period from 1900 to 1945 catapulted us to the apogee of global political, economic, and military dominance.  From isolationism and the myth that we could reside in a state of full independence from the power struggles of the other great powers, we embraced a role as the primary articulator of a bipolar struggle between the free capitalist West and the authoritarian socialist other.  The North Atlantic alliance, emerging from the struggle to defeat fascism, constituted the institutional bulwark of this new world order and the new balance of power in Eurasia, containing, in particular, the expansion of Soviet socialism.  The solidity of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) enabled the eventual apparent victory of the West.  As Soviet socialism collapsed, countries straddled under its yoke scrambled to join forces with the Western victors, leaving a generation of Russian leaders and aspiring liberal reformers isolated and disempowered in a shrinking sphere of political influence, subject to the revanchist appeal to Orthodoxy and old-timey Russian ethno-nationalism.  We will subsequently consider the highly problematic situation confronting the West in its present relations with the Russian Federation and why we largely have ourselves to blame for this situation, but for now we need to confront the question of NATO per se, as a quintessential marker of the divergence of Twentieth century American foreign policy in relation to that of the broader course of our history.  

Emphatically, we Americans live in the world, we have always lived in the world, and we can never extract ourselves from the world.  The naive presumption that we can put up walls and protect ourselves from the power struggles that swirl around us, in evident independence from our own actions, has been permanently rendered false and counterproductive to the engagements of our citizens with the wider world.  We need to balance our collective engagements with the wider world in such a way that we enable our citizens, throughout the states, to stand as free actors within the world, undeterred by external threats.  We have acknowledged that the limited terms under which we would seek to collaborate with our countrymen must include the provision of a common continental defensive against external threats.  Conversely, we would question the possibility of engaging in any new manifestations of an aggressive, externally focused foreign policy, especially involving the utilization of US military power, to achieve broader policy agendas under a principle of common consensus among all of the states.  If we are to achieve the sort of Constitutional realignment that we seek, then it may never be possible for us to, again, assemble broader coalitions of foreign countries to undertake foreign policy objectives by means of military action provided we cannot secure universal consent from every sovereign state through the vehicle of Congress.  We would accept nothing less as a threshold of consent to extend our military power beyond the strict purposes of defending American soil.  If we, in the states, are to truly be sovereign, then no employment of American military power on foreign soil can ever be allowed absent universal, unanimous consent from all of the states.  

We acknowledge that our proposed realignment of Constitutional authority does not absolutely preclude the possibility of entangling alliances, enforcing on the United States obligations to employ military force in defense of allied foreign countries.  On the other hand, we need to strictly reconsider every alliance structure into which the United States has become entangled to solicit full and unanimous agreement with the terms of our alliance obligations from every state.  In particular, to what extent will we or should we consent to absolute fidelity with the terms of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty?  This question is not a petty issue of semantics but an existential problem structuring the political fault lines against which the next world war might be waged.  In the event that the current signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty extend an offer of membership, for example, to Ukraine, would we be willing to engage in the offensive use of American military forces to clear the Don basin of separatist forces linked to the Russian Federation through Ukrainian invocation of Article 5, even if such a mobilization of US forces might lead to a strategic nuclear engagement between the US and the Russian Federation?  Conversely, if Ukraine was allowed to join NATO with the proviso that its capacity to invoke Article 5 in its own defense against the Russian Federation would be strictly limited, then would we render the North Atlantic Treaty itself a moribund, sterile relic of the Cold War, nominally unifying the states of Western Europe but otherwise toothless in its defense of states too closely lodged in the shadow of Russian power?  We do not have an answer to these questions, but we are adamantly determined that they will be asked, that every sovereign American state will advance its answer, and that, in the event unanimity cannot be realized, our present involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty will be henceforth concluded.  We will not allow the lineages of past theories of foreign policy, ossified through treaty obligations, to strangulate us in the present or doom us and our posterity in our sovereign futures.

In regard to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, we would acknowledge a number of critical conclusions.  The maintenance of a defense alliance between Western European states, oriented toward containment of the growth of the Eastern bloc of Soviet-dominated states in the aftermath of the Second World War, made complete sense as an element of US foreign policy.  However, the ideological conflict that gave rise to this alliance has ended.  In its place, NATO has sustained itself and expanded its membership by virtue of a common antagonism, notably among newer Eastern European member states, with the post-Soviet Russian Federation.  We understand why a Russophobic paranoia was bound to become the governing ideology of a post-Soviet era North Atlantic alliance, if only by recourse to the history of Russian imperial relations with a number of ethnic/national groups in Eastern Europe.  It was, however, a mistake for the United States to nurture such an animus among the Eastern Europeans toward Russia or to accept their fears of Russian political influence in Eastern Europe at face value in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse.  We have ever since been dealing with the consequences of our actions to marginalize the Russian Federation from Europe rather than to aggressively integrate it into the West and support post-Soviet, pan-European Russian liberalism, if at the expense of continued American influence in Europe.  The continued peace and security of Europe, including that of the Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and others in Eastern Europe, relative to continued Russian efforts to restore their political influence over the continent and especially over their closest neighbors, will not be served either by extending the NATO alliance further East or even by maintaining it in its current form.  

We would support the existence of a defense alliance between the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, the German Federal Republic, and other Western European states on the terms of the original North Atlantic Treaty, replete with its Article 5 trigger for mutual responsiveness among all member states to an attack on any member state.  Conversely, we reject the extension of this alliance to each of the Eastern European states added since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and, if the continued membership of these states in NATO is categorically supported by our Western European and Canadian partners, then, for our part, we would be satisfied to see NATO reconstituted in the United State's absence.  We will not support a mutual defensive treaty with the Article 5 trigger extended to include the totality of the Russian Federation's western border.  Rather, we would acknowledge that some middle road in diplomacy and defensive support for the states of Eastern Europe may be desirable and even necessary in the near term, until the Russian Federation can be fully integrated as a well-behaved member in a liberal world order and as a part of a unified, democratic, liberal, and secular Europe.  Beyond these concerns, we categorically oppose the continued inclusion of Turkey as a full-fledged member of the NATO alliance to the extent that its current government flirts with authoritarian institutional changes, the erosion of post-Ottoman constitutional secularism, and casual military cooperation with Putin's Russian Federation in addition to the violent suppression of Kurdish autonomy both within Turkey and externally in Syria and Iraq.  We will not support continued American involvement in any military alliance involving the present government of Turkey, although we will support any diplomatic efforts to steer Turkey off the path currently forged by Erdoğan's AKP and back toward progressive integration with a secular, inclusive, and liberal Europe. 

We are satisfied that Washington's admonishment in his parting address to avoid entangling foreign alliances was too strict and too categorical to serve as an operative principle for the foreign policy of the United States in the present world order, however, it presents us with a practical warning that we, as a people, will in turn be shaped by our relations with the outside world.  Our mutual defensive agreements have structured both our broader foreign policies and our own domestic politics for at least a century.  They have nurtured red scares and broader generational revolts against the social order that have participated in the continuous articulation and reinterpretation of our domestic Constitutional order.  And they have supported the growth in power and influence of the very military industrial complex of which Eisenhower urged us to be weary.  At this moment, we are presented with particular circumstances that demand that we completely reconsider how we engaged with the rest of the world collectively as a country.  If we cannot come to any practical consensus on our own domestic political commitments, then how can we conceivably engage as a unity with our allies, let alone with the rest of the world? 

 

Foreign Relations: The Global Multilateral Liberal Order

The Twentieth century gave rise to a number of international institutions prefigured on the principle that cooperation among nations on a range of issues of common concern might resolve such issues in a manner conducive to all parties, in turn, eliminating recourse to violence in areas prone to conflict.  Multilateralism was the foundational principle of the League of Nations and of its successor, the United Nations.  It, further, grounded the workings of the economic institutions associated with the Bretton Woods system, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO).  Even in the absence of the normative rules of the game initially established by the Bretton Woods agreement, the existence of deliberative bodies organized, at least nominally, to achieve multilateral consensus on policies regarding international commerce and capital flows, to police transgressive behavior by particular national actors, and to seriously incorporate the concerns of smaller or otherwise less influential actors on the global economic stage represents an important step toward the fulfillment of Adam Smith's aspirations of a world unified in the creation of boundless wealth to satisfy human need, dispersed across all humanity by the invisible hand of the market.  In recent years, nations have come together to address the realization of the existential threat represented by climate change, and the Paris Accords constitute an important starting point in addressing climate change and beginning the long struggle of humanity to transform a wide range of everyday human activities, especially in the advanced Western economies, against the imperative for reducing carbon emissions.  The concerns that prompted the Paris Accord will only ever be successfully addressed through the realization of a global consensus and an understanding of the obligations of every national actor on the global stage to undertake fundamental macroeconomic transformations.  

For our part, we recognize the overall importance of multilateralism.  We reject the notion that the United States or any other national actor should be free to transgress broader international norms in its own interests without consequences.  Conversely, we also recognize that international deliberative bodies are skewed by alliance structures and institutional rules designed to insulate particular parties from the force of broader consensus.  The Security Council of the United Nations was established to achieve multilateral resolutions of international conflicts and concerns over the status of populations, especially racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, engaged in domestic conflicts with the governments of member states.  However, the particular structure and institutional rules of the Security Council, especially the entrenchment of veto power among a circumscribed list of permanent council members, renders the efficacy of the Security Council in performing its mission hopelessly compromised.  Moreover, certain institutions, like the enforcement of international standards for criminalization of particular actions in the course of war, lack any meaningful and universal organizational and procedural framework.  If every nation agrees that certain actions undertaken by combatants in the course of military conflict should be construed as war crimes, then we simultaneously lack a single enforcement authority to police war crimes commanding universal legitimacy among all nations.  The United States, for its part, will not recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a logical repository of authority to prosecute war crimes, instead insisting that we, alone, should be the judge of crimes against humanity committed by combatants acting under the authority of the United States government.  This position has been echoed by a range of other states, including the People's Republic of China and Israel, for whom any potential prosecutorial investigation of domestic actions against subject ethnic and religious minorities have been cited as violations of sovereignty.  

To clarify our own position in regard to these issues, we adamantly support multilateralism, even to the extent that it undermines certain elements of our sovereign authority.  Proceeding from the dictum that no immoral action can ever be sanctified by the force of law in the interests of the state, we acknowledge that actions undertaken by military personnel in the defense of this Commonwealth that violate the terms of the Geneva Convention, inclusive of its initial component parts and its three subsequent protocols, whether actively ratified by the government of the United States or merely standing as elements of common international moral consensus, should be prosecuted through juridical proceedings that comply with our understanding of procedural due process.  Our claim to sovereignty, in our quest to reframe the Constitutional terms of American federalism, shall not include the right of combatants acting in our name to intentional wage war against unarmed civilians or to violate the rights of wounded enemy combatants or those of prisoners of war, and, to the extent that we are able to do so, we will surrender accused war criminals under our jurisdiction to the international judicial process.  Conversely, we recognize that our capacity to invoke our own compliance with multilateral authority in the adjudication of claims for such issues as war crimes may be strictly limited.  We do not know the extent to which we will be enabled to engage internationally as a sovereign actor on the global stage, much less a signatory to the Rome Statute governing the operations of the International Criminal Court.  In the end, we may be confined to accept a more limited role while the federal government of the United States continues to act on our behalf on matters of international law and the negotiation of diplomatic treaties, but we, of this party, will continue to push for a foreign policy that privileges multilateralism and the transcendence of institutional restrictions on the force of international consensus over the limited parochial interests of particular national actors, including those of the United States.  

With regard to the multilateral negotiation of agreements concerning commerce, the free international movement of commodities, capital, and, under certain restrictions, labor, we are determined that the federal government of the United States should be, as thoroughly as possible, stripped of its authority to negotiate on the behalf of its sovereign members and, where possible, the status of the United States as signatory to certain international agreements should be stricken so as to enable each sovereign state to decide when particular international economic agreements serve their own sovereign interests.  We acknowledge that our own actions should never contravene the legitimate interests under which our union in defense of our collective national security will have been established, but we also acknowledge that the citizens of every state have and will continue to manifest vastly different interests in approaching the global economy, and it will be impossible to balance these interests effectively through the federal government.  For the same reason that we are determined to eliminate the common US dollar as legal tender across the United States, we are determined that every state should determine for itself whether or not to ratify the present terms of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and request membership as a signatory within the World Trade Organization.  We, in Massachusetts, will negotiate the particular inconveniences involved in liberating our macroeconomy from that of the United States as a whole, but we are convinced of the ultimate necessity in doing so and will accept nothing less than a complete Constitutional resignation of the role of Congress in regulating either our domestic macroeconomy or our economic engagement with the rest of the world.   

We remain confident in the possibilities for progressive multilateral governance in a range of policy areas of mutual concern to all of humanity, most especially collective transnational care of our collective ecological endowment.  To whatever extent we are able to achieve a consensus with out own countrymen in the conservative states over proactive action on climate issues, we will pursue a role for the government of the Commonwealth in the multilateral negotiation of new regulatory initiatives on the international level.  If we can do no more than participate as willing contributors to such discussions, then, perhaps, we will increasingly influence the views espoused by the conservative leaders and electorates of Alabama or Idaho or Alaska to recognize that humanity's larger conversation over the future of the planet demands their input as a voice among many as well, and we will anxiously await them to join us.  Nor will we demand that our place at the table should be more weighty than those assigned to other participants from less favored, less wealthy corners of the planet.  Rather, we will commit to reconceptualize our own proportional standing within the broader ensemble of common humanity both to affirm the equality of all nations and recognize that our own unique place within the world and the historical course of our development has conferred on us unique privileges and responsibilities in our relationship to the rest of the world and, in these respects, we will pursue transnational unity and consensus within a world of equals.  

World Trade, Tariff Barriers, and the Competitive Standing of the Commonwealth

The broader history of global economic development has convinced us that every moment of economic nationalism, punctuated by the imposition of trade barriers, high tariff rates for wide ranges of goods in the stream of international commerce, and restrictions on the movement of capital and labor between national economies, has rendered consumers, producers, and investors across the wider span of the global economy worse off.  Prolonged moments of intensified economic nationalism, like those that accompanied the Great Depression of the 1930s, have contributed to intense political instabilities that have undermined democratic institutions across the world.  Absent the context of economic isolation experienced by Weimar Germany and the total breakdown of integrated trade and capital investment across Europe in the early stages of the global economic downturn in the 1930s, it might have been less conceivable for millions of German citizens to cast their lot with the National Socialists and Hitler with promises of reinvigorated domestic economic development through militarization.  Conversely, we understand the diverse motivations and justifications made for the imposition of controls on trade and on the flow of production factors between national economies and, emphatically, good arguments can be made for trade protection in support of the longer term development of particular sectors of strategic importance for a particular national economy, sheltering firms from the short term detrimental effects of international competition.  Succinctly, we are incapable of advancing a general statement categorically supporting the absolute elimination of controls on trade and on the flow of production factors between national economies.  Rather, as a matter of political philosophy and of policy preferences, this party intends to err on the side of free trade as an institutional means by which to support the development of all corners of the global economy, including our Commonwealth.

We acknowledge that our position on trade and on the international flow of labor and capital interjects us within a highly contentious realm in American partisan politics.  In 2016, the Trump campaign was able to successfully extract a number of Midwestern Rust belt states from Democratic Party electoral support by virtue of its support for trade restrictions in a number of key industries, most notably steel and automobiles.  The history of these industries in the United States and their relationship with the broader course of global economic development is long and complicated, and it is interspersed with global strategic policy concerns related to the Cold War and the support of our allies in post-war economic reconstruction.  In this regard, we would acknowledge that a great many industries that once provided millions of jobs for American workers have precipitously declined since the mid-Twentieth century under a combination of passive indifference and active hobbling of domestic manufacturers from federal policymakers.  We would further argue that it is impossible, especially under the present circumstances of partisan political struggle, for the federal government to reverse seventy years of decline in mass manufacturing in the United States even if we were predisposed to embark on such a crusade in domestic economic development.  The United States does not presently satisfy the majority of its domestic demand for structural steel through domestic production, and, to whatever extent the regional economies of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Birmingham, Alabama have been compelled to adjust to the loss of steel manufacturing jobs, we have largely benefited across the US economy from international commerce in less expensive structural steel produced with newer technologies in foreign economies, in certain cases by one-time domestic steel producers who have chosen to move their operations abroad.  The global economy has changed and will continue to change over time, and our domestic economy will continue to change with it, notwithstanding the empty promises of unscrupulous politicians like Trump to miraculously bring back all that has been lost by those who have been subjected to the worst consequences of creative destruction by capital.

With regard to the trading practices of a range of domestic and foreign corporate actors, we certainly harbor concerns over the possibilities of dumping goods into the circuit of commerce in Massachusetts for the explicit purpose of stealing market share from Massachusetts producers, but, even in these regards, we have to be mindful of the larger dynamics of long term technological and commercial development.  Our Commonwealth once housed hundreds of manufacturers of inexpensive, mass produced cotton textile products, an industry that employed tens of thousands of Massachusetts workers, attracting tens of thousands more over generations from Ireland, Canada, and Southern and Eastern Europe.  By the 1960s, however, that industry had largely disappeared because existing manufacturers either felt the pressure induced by lower labor costs in other regions of the United States or in foreign countries and chose to relocate, or they capitulated outright in the face of adverse long term market conditions and simply liquidated their capital and closed shop, leaving behind landscapes of abandoned and deteriorating mills.  In the period since, some textile producers profiting from particular market niches, often involving computer based design, use of synthetic materials, and advanced labor-saving manufacturing techniques, have remained in Massachusetts and other New England states, but their industrial footprint is minuscule in comparison to what it once was.  We can acknowledge that the loss of this industry, together that of other industries like machine tools, has induced economic trauma on numerous communities within the Commonwealth.  Towns like Pittsfield, from which General Electric exited in the interest of moving its own transistor manufacturing operations and those of a range of other compliant subcontractors to Mexico, have never really recovered from decades of economic decline through de-industrialization.  Our broader initiatives to reconfigure labor markets in Massachusetts and support new, community-oriented economic supports for households will have such communities in mind as we ask how we can best address the needs of our citizens who have been left behind by the shifting winds of capitalism.

On the other hand, as certain industries have abandoned Massachusetts, others have discovered new opportunities, nurtured especially by the depth of academic research conducted in our colleges and universities and in independent research institutes, particular in health care/pharmaceuticals and in computer sciences.  Technological opportunities and commercial specializations of particular macroeconomies continuously evolve over time.  We reject the possibility of bringing back the mass production of cotton textiles to Massachusetts now or at any point in the future.  The jobs that the textile industry made for generations of Massachusetts residents are gone forever, but, provided we commit to creating conditions favorable to new entrepreneurial initiatives, they will continuously be replaced by new jobs in new industries that we do not even anticipate at this moment in our history.  As we have argued, such favorable conditions cannot simply be limited to the lowest available tax rates on corporate earnings and capital gains, but must incorporate a balance of fiscal responsibility, provision of adequate physical, technological, and institutional infrastructures and an adequate social safety net for workers by the state, and a fundamentally free and open regulatory environment and marketplace.  In the interest of maintaining an environment most favorable to development of great entrepreneurial ideas by Massachusetts residents, especially with regard to export-oriented industries, we will remain extremely mindful of restrictions on free trade.  If there are to be any restrictions on trade of goods entering the Commonwealth, then they will be strictly short term and targeted for expressed purposes related to the viability of particular segments of the Massachusetts economy, and they will respect the multilateral rules of the game outlined by the World Trade Organization.  Pointedly, we are committed to working within the multilateral world trading system to define rules that ensure fairness for all participants in global trade among every country, and we will respect those rules in our actions related to the Massachusetts economy.

Outlining certain specific terms in the articulation of our position on international trade policy and, more fundamentally, on the retraction of a federal role in the regulation of trade, we intend to scrap the International Trade Administration, in addition to the other bureaus of the federal Department of Commerce.  The federal government will have no prospective substantive role in the formation and formalization of trade policies managed by each individual state government or by coalitions of state governments.  Rather, we will concede that Congress has a retrospective role to play in authorizing individual states and coalitions of states to enter into either multilateral or bilateral trade agreements with foreign governments.  We will seek to create a constrained set of rules and procedures for Congress to evaluate individual trade agreements to ensure that such agreements do not imperil the interests of national security expressly conceded through our Constitutional structure to Congress.  Conversely, where national security concerns cannot be adequately specified to condemn the terms of a particular trade agreement, Congress will be prohibited from blocking the free exercise of individual state governments to manage their international trade.  Each state will be wholly responsible for enforcement of the terms of trade agreements, including the rigorous verification and enforcement of rules of origin on commodities emerging from complex transnational supply chains for exchange and consumption in particular state marketplaces.  Nor will there be an Office of the US Trade Representative.  We will not tolerate the maintenance of any role for the Executive branch of the federal government in managing international trade.  Finally, as we have argued previously, we will not tolerate the presence of any federal trade enforcement authorities on our sovereign soil.  We will scrap the federal Customs and Border Protection Service and the trade-related responsibilities of this agency will be conferred on our state-level authorities.

In Massachusetts, we will establish our own Office of the Trade Representative as a component of the executive office of the Governor of the Commonwealth.  This office will, further, supervise a broader administration to conduct research into patterns of commerce with foreign states, including maintenance of rules of origin standards on goods entering the stream of commerce in Massachusetts, and to develop strategic planning on international trade negotiations, principally on a multilateral basis through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and secondarily on a bilateral basis to establish most favored trading partner status for particular foreign trading partners.  Similarly, the General Court of the Commonwealth will establish a Joint Committee on Trade and Tariff Management both to conduct detailed evaluations on negotiated trade agreements and grant preliminary authorization on such agreements and to articulate formal policies for which the Office of the Trade Representative will be tasked to act in the interest of the Commonwealth in its international negotiations.  Finally, we will either establish a separate division of the Massachusetts State Police or an independent trade and customs enforcement authority to oversee the everyday practice of the transshipment of goods into the Commonwealth and to verify that tariffs have been paid by importers where appropriate.  We will work to clarify and simplify procedures for registering goods imported into the Commonwealth, to verify that goods imported into our food systems have been thoroughly inspected in accordance with standards defined by the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture, and to readily facilitate the payment and thorough recording of all tariffs in order to ensure that commerce between the Commonwealth and the outside world remains smooth and, as much as possible, frictionless.

We need to briefly consider commerce with our countrymen in the other American states.  Above we asserted that we will defend the retention of the Constitution of 1787's Article I Section 10 prohibition on the enactment of tariffs on goods exchanged between states except as necessary to manage the cost of inspections between jurisdictions.  Insofar as overarching federal bureaucracies tasked with the purposes of inspecting materials destined for interstate commerce will go away, we will all be confronted with a complex regime of inspections, in the absence of bilateral or multilateral agreements between states to authorize and enforce common inspection standards.  This multiplication of regulatory regimes impeding the perfectly free flow of goods and services between states will necessarily inflict costs on consumers and on firms in every state.  Emphatically, the transactions costs of interstate commerce will rise, even in the absence of the enactment of tariffs, and it will be a price to be confronted as an expense of regaining our sovereignty in the face of a broken federal regime that can no longer be effectively managed in the interest of every American citizen across the states.  Furthermore, even if we are willing to concede that tariffs should not be enacted on goods exchanged between states, we have already argued that we will not permit the free flow of commerce in goods into Massachusetts from states that allow labor practices that diverge substantially from our collective conception of fairness in this Commonwealth.  We may wholly prohibit the exchange of goods and services from other states produced with child labor or produced by workers compensated at wage rates and with ancillary benefits that do not satisfy minimum standards consistent with our conception of fundamental fairness, duly taking into consideration differences in costs of living and appreciation or depreciation of local currency values relative to Massachusetts.  

Moreover, we acknowledge that, as each state opens up to commerce with the remainder of the world in uneven and unbalanced ways, we, in Massachusetts, may import goods from certain foreign trading partners that would be wholly prohibited in other states, even if Congress does not retrospectively vitiate our capacity to engage in such trade for national security reasons.  Some states are likely to become privileged entrepôts for goods from certain foreign economies, providing windows into the broader, tariff-restricted American interstate trade zone for foreign firms with potentially questionable labor and competitive practices.  Other states may, for example, authorize the entry of goods from firms manufacturing in Vietnam or Bangladesh under adverse labor practices that we, in Massachusetts, would regard as wholly exploitative.  We will certainly have to assess such circumstances as they arise, but we might be inclined to place restrictions on the entry of such goods into Massachusetts.  Invariably, interstate commerce will become a serious cause of conflict between the states that will have to be sorted out through Congress and the federal judiciary, and we will do what we have to support and defend the interests of our citizens in Massachusetts with respect to the regulation of interstate commerce and, more generally, the management of the flow of goods and services into our states from other states and from foreign macroeconomies.  To the greatest extent possible, we will privilege free trade, but we will never sacrifice the entrepreneurial interests of Massachusetts residents on the altar of global free trade or even on the principle of a single American marketplace.  

          

With regard to interstate and international flows of capital, we do not intend to prejudice either the inflow of capital funds into the Commonwealth from sources outside of Massachusetts or the movement of capital held by citizens of the Commonwealth outside of Massachusetts for the purposes of proprietary investments or to contribute to the investments of firms outside of Massachusetts.  Any regulatory regime for interstate and international commerce must come to terms with the movement of productive factors between macroeconomies, including capital, natural resources, and, critically, labor.  We will further address how we intend to approach the flow of people between our sovereign jurisdiction and outside areas, but, in this section, we can definitively argue that we will legally sanction the flow of capital into and out of our macroeconomy without restrictions.  Conversely, productive investments in the Massachusetts macroeconomy will be taxed without prejudice.  We will apply corporate taxes on profits generated through activities in Massachusetts evenly between firms headquartered and legally registered in the Commonwealth and those headquartered and/or registered outside of Massachusetts, and we will not permit sheltering of tax liabilities in outside jurisdictions through creative internal corporate accounting practices.  In particular, we will assess the stream of revenues emanating from particular elements of intellectual property developed through activities situated in the Commonwealth, often in conjunction with activities in our private and public institutions of higher learning and research, and we will develop methodologies to effectively isolate value added in Massachusetts and extract taxable profits relative to the scale of entrepreneurial investments in a manner that will be both reasonable and competitive in relation to taxation in outside jurisdictions.  We will also support every effort to harmonize tax rates on corporate profits on the international level in order to better secure the fiscal capacities of every governmental jurisdiction and deprive corporate actors of any opportunity to play off particular local tax policies of international tax havens.  We hope to be an inviting location for outside capital investments, but we will not allow footloose and free wheeling corporate actors to strip mine the particular advantages afforded from locating in Massachusetts while not paying their fair share to uphold the collective sources of such competitive advantages.  

As with every other component of Massachusetts' future engagement with the outside world, we hold faith in the possibilities for multilateral, liberal regulation of commerce and the flow of production factors between macroeconomies, recognizing, in turn, that commercial relations will reinforce our broader commitments to multilateral maintenance of the peace and for joint resolution of issues of common ecological concern transcending national frontiers.  International and interstate commerce will remain a work in progress for us and for every sovereign American state government, but we believe in the potential realize mutual macroeconomic growth and development through freer trade and efficiently regulated flows of production factors across borders, recognizing, further, that we will continue to labor collectively with our countrymen through Congress and through submission to the deliberations of the federal judiciary to ensure that our international trade relations do not undermine our national security or promote interstate conflicts that damage the minimal terms under which we seek to reinforce our national unity.    

Russia and the Anti-Liberal Reactionaries

The history of the United States, as the quintessential liberal experiment in governance emerging from the Western Enlightenment, has, in certain fundamental ways, been intertwined with the history of Russia, as the great anti-liberal other to the West.  So much of Russian history, and especially the Soviet experiment and the lingering impact of the Russian transformation of Marxist ideology, needs to be understood through the prism of anti-liberalism and the efforts of indigenous Russian thinkers to create something unique and, in its own terms, compelling as a counterargument to the economic, cultural, and political developmental models of the West.  For our part, we recognize that so much of Russian history deserves reexamination and reconsideration to fully account for the myriad ways in which Russians have contributed to the broader construction of Common humanity in our time.  With every other ethnic culture across the global landscape, the Russian people deserve a seat at the table in broader conversations about the future of humanity and our place as a species in global ecology. Conversely, we cannot condone the particular ways in which the present government of the Russian Federation has recently confronted the West, in general, and the United States, in particular.  Rather than engaging constructively with us to forge economic and political connections to the West, they have threatened the sovereignty of their immediate neighbors, impeded the development of a domestic liberal opposition, and waged cyber warfare, both through private proxy actors and through agencies of the Russian state, against our sovereign governments, institutions of civil society, and private corporate organizations. We need to broadly consider how and why we have come to the present state of relations between the United States and the Russian Federation, how these relations might be expected to change as our Constitutional organization and federal institutions evolve, and how Massachusetts, as a sovereign state in a changing union of sovereign states, should approach the problem of relations with the Russian Federation, both in our own interests and in the interest of maintaining the peace between two nuclear powers.

For our purposes, the longer history of American and Russian relations demands a realistic point of departure in the Western and Soviet military alliance of the Second World War.  The early 1940s not only established a precedent for the ability of the Western liberal democracies to work constructively with a Soviet regime uniquely shaped by the longer course of Russian anti-liberalism extending back to the rule of the Romanovs, but it also established the limitations on what we would be able to achieve in our relations with the Russians if we were simultaneously compelled to accept defined geographic spheres of influence for the Western powers and for the Soviet Union.  The aftermath of the war definitively gave Stalin what he had wanted in a buffer zone of Eastern European satellite socialist republics to defend the heartlands of the Soviet Union from any land based Western military incursions.  It also largely defined the high water mark of Soviet power against which older and more conservatively minded Russians can still look back wistfully at a moment in which their leaders in the halls of the Kremlin possessed a decisive grip over the political culture of almost half of Europe, while the influence of communist ideology throughout the globe, under the domineering gaze of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, challenged almost every established body of political, economic, and cultural thinking even in many of the Western liberal democracies.  In hindsight, this moment in history revealed much more about the failings of Western liberal democracy and of undiminished laissez-faire private capitalism against the empty promises of political authoritarianism and state-centric militaristic economic development in times as desperate as the 1930s.  As we stumbled under the weight of our own systemic deficiencies, authoritarianism profited and established what seemed to be the conditions for a durable anti-liberal, anti-democratic world order.  The Cold War that followed until the Soviet Union's collapse was a pointless global tug of war over ideology that ultimately proved the sterility of the anti-liberal Soviet project.  The abortive efforts of Gorbachev and a generation of pragmatic Communist Party reformers to revitalize the Soviet system by means of targeted liberal political and economic reforms proved that open-ended Russian domination over a cacophony of ethnic nationalities with divergent aspirations for engagement and connection with the broader world was not sustainable in the absence of centralizing military oppression.  In our view, the centrality of ethnic Russian domination over other ethnic groups for the entire Soviet period, notwithstanding the government leadership of the Georgian Stalin and the Ukrainian Kruschev, constitutes a critical linchpin in the political continuity of the Soviet system as a historical descendant to long standing Russian ethnic imperial aspirations.   

Emphatically, Russia has never been liberal.  The basic liberal presumption of the indissoluble moral freedom of individuals in society and the virtue of free, mutually consensual and beneficial cooperation between individuals as the grounding of market oriented economics remain essentially alien to the still dominant ideological currents of Russian civil society.  Before the Soviet period, Russian society was rigidly hierarchical and structured through ethnicity and proximity to post-feudal aristocratic and Orthodox religious culture.  Over the Soviet period, membership in the Communist Party and positionality within the state bureaucratic apparatus became the bases against which hierarchy was reconstructed.  In post-Soviet times, as state bureaus like the KGB transmogrified themselves into private syndicates of extra-legal power brokers, practitioners of non-state repressive violence, and wealth magnates, gorging themselves in the free-for-all of state asset privatization, the terms of hierarchy changed again.  The Russians have never existed within a political culture of free and equal democratic citizens under the impartial rule of law.  Nor have they ever enjoyed economies structured to harness the full entrepreneurial vigor of free risk-taking agents in open, competitive domestic markets.  They have perpetually existed as a hierarchical society under the rule of strong men of various organizational colors, shaped by messianic, Slavo-philic ideologies defining and justifying the imperial aspirations of the Russian state and nurtured by the moral conservatism of the Orthodox patriarchy.  Their domestic economy has been continuously shaped by the exclusion of the majority from any hope of personal income mobility through individual or collective entrepreneurship, a pattern of which the Soviet period and the bureaucratic dictatorship of the Communist Party represented only the most extreme version.  Even in its most liberatory and revolutionary moments, the Soviet experiment never succeeded in displacing the basic ideological points of reference from the broader course of Russian history, and, at the present moment, aspiring Russian liberals continue to struggle against the current of anti-liberal ideologies underpinning the exercise of state and non-state violence in the contemporary Russian Federation.  In United Russia and the domineering leadership of Putin, another generation of Russians have been saddled with a paucity of opportunities for democratic participation in self-government, lack of freedom to openly criticize the direction of state policies or even to hear alternative voices in political discourse through the institution of a free and independent media, a renewal of social and ethnic prejudices and latent conservative, backward-looking ideologies from a rehabilitated institution of Russian Orthodoxy, and a stifling of opportunities for improvement of personal economic well-being through the relative economic isolation of the Russian Federation from the most dynamic corners of the global economy.   

To these deficiencies of Russian anti-liberalism we must add the continued subordination of ethnic non-Russians, both within the Russian Federation and on its periphery.  In this respect, the recurring violent repression of sovereign national aspirations Chechen and Dajestani Muslims in the Russian Northern Caucasus represents the most extreme case.  Conversely, a long history of Russian ethnic dispersion across the space of the old Tsarist empire and, subsequently, throughout the old Soviet republics has left a landscape in which Russian minority populations continue to exert a disproportionate influence over the political cultures in majority non-Russian areas, thanks in part to the domineering bravado of Putin and United Russia in the Russian Federation's articulation of foreign policy toward its immediate neighbors.  The present government of the Russian Federation as, thus, made it clear by their actions that they mean, to the extent possible within their means, to reconstruct the Russian empire on the backs of otherwise sovereign non-Russian peoples.  In doing so, they are culpable for the rise of Sunni Muslim Salafism in the Northern Caucasus, both as a driver for regional political instability among subject ethnic groups who had never espoused any strong attachment to political Islam prior to the suppression of the Chechen revolt of the 1990s and as a source of inspiration for terrorist violence against Russian citizens across the breadth of the the Russian Federation.  In no small way, Putin and United Russia are responsible for the Tsarnaev brothers, the same Chechen Salafists who exported their terror to the heart of our Commonwealth.  They are likewise at least partly responsible for the continuation of hostilities in the Don basin of eastern Ukraine in maintaining material support for insurgent separatist ethnic Russian groups against the efforts of the Ukrainian central government to assert control over the oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk.  The Russian Federation is similarly responsible for the continuation of hostile relations between the South Ossetians and the central government of Georgia.  They are responsible for hostilities between Russian minorities and the central government in Moldova.  For our part, we recognize the latent complexities involved in all of these conflicts, but we also acknowledge that, at their core, there remains a basic antagonism between politically dominant Russian and subordinated non-Russian ethnic groups and that the present government of the Russian Federation has profited politically, on the domestic level, by fanning the flames of such antagonisms and demonstrating its fidelity to Russians or otherwise allied ethnic minorities both inside and outside of its immediate spheres of control.

For our part, we acknowledge that the present government of the Russian Federation has its own legitimate interests and prerogatives with regard to the political configuration of the Eurasian land space and that it may be inclined to pursue a range of actions necessary to secure these interests.  Conversely, we will firmly support efforts by the federal government of the United States to hold the government of the Russian Federation to account for actions that clearly transgress international norms with regard to its neighbors, including the utilization of cyber-warfare and clandestine intelligence operations oriented toward undermining the political legitimacy of liberal constitutional institutions.  This resolve is not equivalent to a blanket invitation for states on the Russian periphery to join military alliance structures with automatic response triggers prefigured on the willingness of the United States to intervene militarily against the Russian Federation or any of its proxies.  We adamantly reject the notion that a wide range of states in the immediate Russian periphery should be integrated, today or in the future, into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a bulwark against Russian aggression, and, as we have argued, we would consider the present organization of NATO to be desperately in need of reconsideration in light of the changing defensive needs of the United States and in the interest of more generally reframing Western relations with the Russian Federation.  We will support efforts by the State Department of the United States and the civilian and military intelligence agencies to expand the range of non-military tools of persuasion and sanction with which to respond to unacceptable actions committed by the government of the Russian Federation against its neighbors.  Conversely, we accept that our approach to the policy measures undertaken by the Russian Federation relative to its neighbors must respect a degree of nuance, acknowledging the reasons that might have prompted Russian actions, inclusive of the domestic partisan objectives of United Russia relative to its liberal or otherwise pro-Western opponents and the conditions involved in theaters of Russian action.  Notably, we will not support efforts by the federal government of the United States to play favorites between competing ethnic nationalist, anti-liberal forces deciding the fate of the Don Basin between the government of Ukraine and rebellious proxies of the Russian Federation.  In regard to this conflict, we hold to the premise that the conflict over the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts must be resolved peacefully, respecting the legitimate interests of the governments of Ukraine and  the Russian Federation and, more succinctly, of ethnic Ukrainian and Russian populations living in these jurisdictions and struggling to forge lives in peace and security.                

To the extent that a consensus for actions by the federal government of the United States can be secured, we will support efforts to defend and to mobilize a domestic liberal, pro-Western partisan opposition to United Russia, acknowledging further, in this respect, that it would be difficult if not impossible to choose perfect partners in defense of our interests relative to internal Russian politics.  Nationalist opposition personalities like Navalny do not pristinely embody our hopes to crystallize a liberal, pro-Western opposition, but the movements they inspire might at least represent fertile starting points.  Conversely, for numerous reasons, we maintain doubts that such a consensus in support of Russian liberalism will ever materialize in Washington, especially at a time when a significant segment of the American electorate openly sympathizes with the authoritarian tactics of United Russia.  It is, moreover, quite clear that intelligence agencies of the Russian Federation and the partisan leadership of United Russia have actively pursued intervention in American electoral politics for their own purposes to both undermine our Constitutional institutions and to bolster support for authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism within the American electorate.  In Massachusetts, we may be compelled, in our interests, to actively intervene in Russian electoral politics and in the development of a domestic liberal opposition, either open or clandestine, whether or not the federal government of the United States can be brought to support such actions.  In embarking on such a commitment, we seek to emphasize our own recognition that the Russian Federation and the Russian people everywhere deserve a place at the table among nations to create a world open to peaceful mutual development and respect for common humanity.  In contrast to the lingering Russo-phobic bias exercised by a great many Eurasian professionals in the US State Department and intelligence communities and by the governments of our numerous erstwhile Eastern European allies, we intend to approach relations with the Russian Federation objectively and with a sensitivity toward enduring Russian strategic interests in approaching Europe and the rest of the world.  We are committed, even if only in our small way, to working with the Russians people to move beyond the encumbrance of its long anti-liberal history to join with us in creating a brighter future for ourselves and for all humanity.

China and the Quixotic Marxist Ethno-Nationalists

In concert with the government of the People's Republic of China and the officialdom of the Chinese Communist Party, we harbor profound hopes for the future of China, as a proud and profound culture with a long history, an immense and dynamically entrepreneurial population, and a partisan philosophy grounded in equality and democratic governance in the name of its people and of working people everywhere.  Many of us continue to harbor deep affinities for the same foundational ideas that inspired the rise of China's Communist Party and the declaration of the People's Republic in 1949.  In this respect, we simultaneously acknowledge that the People's Republic and the economic system over which it governs remain a collective work in progress.  From the ashes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Chinese socialism has transformed itself into a truly unique hybrid, globally-oriented, market-driven economic system, increasingly open to the entrepreneurial energies of its people and willing to accept certain degrees of developmental inequality as a cost of up-lifting living standards for the vast majority of its people.  This economic transition has been far from perfect in achieving its objectives, but it has demonstrated an unleashing of the massive potential of China to mobilize its labor, its widely diverse material resource base, and its accumulated financial reserves to propel its bases of manufacturing, services, and technological research into the top echelons of the global economy.  As such, we cannot help but be impressed by this record of economic development, and we are similarly impressed by the growing commitment of the Chinese government and private sectors to steer future economic development toward ecological sustainability.  We look forward to the projected creation of green eco-cities in China, hoping both that they will prove successful in developing vibrant mixed use environments for residential habitation and commercial, and industrial activity but also that they will contribute a wide range range of insights into regional planning that we might emulate here and in other Western contexts.  To the extent that China has come a long way in its economic development over a relatively short span of time and at substantial costs to air and water quality for hundreds of millions of its people, it is evident that the government of the People's Republic is serious in addressing its own ecological deficiencies and its place within the broader human crisis of elevated global carbon levels arising from human industrial activity.  We look forward, through our involvement with the foreign diplomatic apparatus of the federal government of the United States and through international economic diplomacy by the government of our Commonwealth, to engaging with diverse agencies of the government of the People's Republic in mutually beneficial, rather than adversarial, ways, to help reinforce broadly equitable, consumption-driven economic development for our citizens and for those of the People's Republic and to develop robust responses to climate change that can meaningfully impact the rate of global increases in temperatures and mitigate the prevalence of catastrophic climatological events for ourselves and for the population of the People's Republic.

However hopeful we are for China's continued development and its increasing global political and economic centrality in the Twenty-first century world system, we additional harbor certain misgivings regarding a range of actions and policies enacted by the People's Republic.  We understand that the political and economic resurgence of China has been, proverbially, a long march, from the eclipse of Chinese imperial power and submission to the will of diverse Western imperialist powers in the Nineteenth century, through internal fragmentation and civil war in the early Twentieth century and the pangs of revolutionary transformation in the foundational decades of the People's Republic.  And like other once imposing imperial powers, the People's Republic and its leaders remain saddled with the heavy weight of collective memory and the cultural legacy of a once dominant imperium, against which all corners of East Asia owed tribute to the lustrous throne of the Son of Heaven.  That world is gone, but, in certain ways, it continues to shape the approach to leadership and international diplomacy embodied by the Communist Party and the government of the People's Republic.  Recent efforts by military forces of the People's Republic to occupy, topographically transform, and project extensive sovereign territorial claims around isolated and politically contested shoals in the South China Sea are evocative of a fundamentally imperialistic world-view, suggesting not only a rejection of multi-lateral norms of international conflict resolution but also a willingness on the part of the government of the People's Republic to begin forcibly bullying its neighbors, especially in the Philippines and in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.  For our part, we recognize that the People's Republic has substantial interests in facilitating the development of viable economic resources in the South China Sea by its citizens and its private businesses, and, more generally, we recognize that every sovereign political entity has an interest in undertaking comprehensive defensive planning in its peripheral regions to ensure, among other things, that no adjacent bodies of water can be utilized at will as avenues for offensive military actions by foreign powers.  However, the internationally contested nature of the South China Sea as a totality, the close proximity of certain occupied shoals, like Scarborough Shoal/Huangyan Island and the widely disputed Spratly Islands, to the land spaces of China's neighbors, and the overriding necessity of maintaining the South China Sea as a largely open, navigable channel for maritime commerce with important international trade partners for the United States collectively leave us disconcerted with the actions of the People's Republic on its south-eastern maritime periphery.  We support and will continue to support the enforcement of free commercial navigation in the South China Sea, and, to the extent that the United States is called upon to exercise an enforcement role in protecting maritime commerce in the South China Sea, we would support a limited investment of the naval forces of the United States to these ends.  We will not respect any blanket assumption of sovereignty by the People's Republic over free international waterways in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, or the Taiwan Strait.  Furthermore, we will support multi-lateral resolutions of sovereign territorial claims to islands and shoals in the South China Sea and other bodies of water peripheral to the People's Republic, acknowledging both that proximity to the land spaces of particular claimants is an important consideration and that economic developmental rights should be assigned in ways that might mutually enrich divergent national actors across East Asia.  To the extent that economic exploitation of the area of the South China Sea becomes a subject of forcible usurpation and exclusion to parties from one single regional actor, the larger basin will become a powder keg for military and/or paramilitary confrontations to the detriment of every actor in the region and to the broader maintenance of the peace.  We are hopeful that the government of the People's Republic will recognize that there is far more to be gained for its citizens from civil and multi-lateral discussion and resolution of territorial claims in this region.     

Similarly, we harbor concerns regarding the People's Republic's treatment of political activism by pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong.  We recognize, in this regard, that the fate of political institutions in Hong Kong, established in the closing stages  of British colonial rule and extended into the present period by virtue of commitments by the government of the People's Republic to respect a continuity of Western liberal democratic norms under the motto of "One Country, Two Systems," are ultimately subject to the willingness of political authorities in the central government of the People's Republic to maintain such institutions over time as Hong Kong and its neighboring special administrative district in Macau become increasingly integrated into the economic and political institutions of China.  In the concession of Hong Kong by the government of the United Kingdom to the People's Republic, Great Britain corrected a singular wrong committed by the Western imperial powers in carving out parcels of the larger Chinese land space as a reward to acts of military domination over imperial China in the Nineteenth century.  Hong Kong indisputably resides as a component of the sovereign soil of China, and the government of the People's Republic is fully entitled to unilaterally declare an end to the system of "One Country, Two Systems" and to strip the citizens of Hong Kong, as citizens of the People's Republic, of the totality of their individual liberties and privileges established exclusively as a consequence of the agreement to transfer Hong Kong from the United Kingdom.  Conversely, we remain concerned that uncertainties regarding the status of citizens of Hong Kong with respect to their privileges to engage in self-rule through free, multi-party elections and to actively criticize either the government of their Special Administrative Region or the central government of the People's Republic are rendering the dichotomous construction of "One Country, Two Systems" a false promise to the citizens of Hong Kong.  We would urge the government of the People's Republic to undertake an immediate, comprehensive, and transparent reconsideration of the status of Hong Kong and Macau and of its citizens, recognizing that the prevailing Western institutions of these areas, established pursuant to their transfer agreements, may be fundamentally incompatible with those of the People's Republic and, simultaneously, inviting those parties who would oppose the imposition of prevailing Chinese political institutions over Hong Kong and Macau to leave, provided they are able to secure the right to emigrate from future foreign host countries.  In this respect, we would further advise the government of the People's Republic that such an imposition of its will and sovereignty over Hong Kong, especially, might be apt to propel a range of negative economic consequences on the People's Republic, measurable, minimally, through the potential for an immediate brain drain from Hong Kong to recipient sites for highly educated, highly skilled migrants.  The citizens of Hong Kong and Macau are, minimally, entitled to either be reassured of the continuity of the political and economic institutions under which they live or to be confronted unambiguously with their future as citizens of the People's Republic on an equal footing with their neighbors and countrymen across China.

We additionally harbor concerns regarding ethno-nationalist politics in the administration of government and of developmental policies across the territory of the People's Republic.  In a certain sense, moreover, the importance of race and ethnicity in national context ostensibly shaped by a globally-oriented Marxist ideology leaves us somewhat puzzled.  Minimally, we would expect that Chinese communism, having been shaped integrally by the unique conditions and contradictions of the struggle against Western imperialism, might have sought to forge a singular unity in struggle among the workers and peasants under the ethnic, multi-lingual umbrella of Han Chinese culture but that any such unity would, in turn, be shaped by the larger call to situate such a movement against the totality of the global working class struggle against global capitalism.  It would evolve to provide a welcoming place for Manchurian, Mongolian, Tibetan, Turkic, Hmong, and other ethnic groups within the geographic space of the People's Republic to participate on equal standing with their Han Chinese neighbors in the administration of their government, in the multi-level developmental policy apparatus of the Communist Party, and in the ongoing effort to build socialism, however much the larger Chinese economy negotiates its economic future through market-oriented, private entrepreneurial initiatives.  Far be it for us to question the incipient universality of Marxist ideology, but there appears to be something rather bizarre and contradictory going on in the ethnic politics of the People's Republic.  If at one point Stalin could have advanced the argument for socialism in one country, then, today, the Communist Party of China appears to be advancing an argument of socialism for one privileged, dominant ethnic group and second-class citizenship for every other ethnic identity under its governance.  For our part, we would not question the centrality of the Han ethnic group within the land space of the People's Republic and the importance of every vestige of Han ethnic culture, with lingering elements of a heritage stretching back over three to four millennia notwithstanding the best efforts of the Red Guard generation to wipe the slate clean for a universalist communist future.  Conversely, as we have argued above, this heritage has included a long history of imperial bullying of subordinate peoples, otherwise denied inclusion within the dominant culture of Han China.  Today, as Han populations spill out of the geographies within which they had traditionally existed as ethnic majorities, other ethnic groups experience the invasion of their home regions by Han migrants and the ongoing transformation of their cultural lives.  We fear for the political, economic, and, especially, cultural future of the ethnic Tibetans in a Tibetan Autonomous Region that is increasingly being populated with Han Chinese migrants.  We, likewise, fear for the future of the Turkic Uigur peoples of Xinjiang.  To the extent that we respect the idea that both these unique and distinct ethnic groups might belong within the broader political and economic unity represented by the People's Republic, we are appalled by the notion that they and their unique cultures might simply be swept away, against their will, by the irresistible force of Han cultural domination and by the oppressive tactics of a government and Communist Party for whom their inclusive participation in an ongoing and transitioning polity is simply not welcome.  Assuming the leadership of the government and of the Communist Party of the People's Republic does not make an convincing effort to meaningfully transform its patterns of governance over the various autonomous regions within which Han populations have traditionally been a minority to ensure that resident non-Han ethnic groups enjoy meaningful opportunities to participate in their own self government in cooperation with the central government of the People's Republic and a substantial margin of cultural autonomy at home, we would, as a party, support efforts by subordinated ethnic groups to pursue regional separatism and to regain their sovereignty by means of self-liberation against a People's Republic that has no room for them against the expansiveness of Han Chinese culture.    

In tandem with our broader concerns for the treatment of ethnic minorities across the landscape of the People's Republic, we would further implore the Chinese government and the leadership of the Communist Party to proceed with caution in its treatment of the Uigurs in Xinjiang if only because we fear that overly zealous tactics against majority Sunni Muslim ethnic groups, even ones with a shallow connection to the tides of political activism in the Islamic world, might be apt to stimulate Salafist militancy and the development of new regional offshoots of the Islamic State or Al Qaeda networks.  It has become more common to hear that administrative districts in Xinjiang have been actively engaged in the construction of camps to sequester broad segments of local Uigur populations for the purposes of re-education and forced labor.  Coupling such efforts with recourse to recurring militant secularist ideologies in the treatment of sectarian religious authorities might certainly generate the sort of environment, rife with political discontent among local populations, in which Salafist militants from outside of the People's Republic might readily find an audience among the Uigurs, especially via information technology.  This was clearly the case with the Russian Federation's policing of Chechen and Dajestani Muslims in the North Caucasus in the 1990s, populations that would otherwise have never fallen prey to the appeals of Salafism.  For the sake of the larger population of the People's Republic and in the interest of stifling Salafist militancy wherever it appears or might otherwise be generated in the peripheral spaces of the Muslim world, we hope never to hear the declaration of a Turkic Uigur Islamic emirate in Xinjiang, an invitation for militants throughout the Muslim world to come to China to wage jihad, or a promise from militants to strike violently at the heart of atheist, communist China in the name of God, the righteous and all powerful.  Rather, we are hopeful that the government of the People's Republic and the leadership of the Communist Party will make palpable efforts to ensure that the Uigurs are not politically or economically marginalized in developmental policies for Xinjiang, that their populations are given every opportunity to share in the continuous enrichment of the Chinese economy in equal standing alongside their Han neighbors in Xinjiang and elsewhere throughout China, that local leaders and entrepreneurial actors of Turkic Uigur ethnicity are invited to actively engage in local organizations of the Communist Party and to rise among its ranks to higher echelons of leadership, and that the Uigurs will be given every reason to evince a sense of pride in the long term commitment to build political, economic, and cultural institutions, common to every citizen of the People's Republic, that nurture hope for an eventual transition to communism, democracy and equality to every working man and woman, and solidarity among every nation in the future of common humanity.

If we are hopeful for the prospects of inter-ethnic solidarity among the various Han and non-Han populations of the People's Republic, then the future status of the Republic of China/Taiwan and, in particular, that of its indigenous non-Han populations remains an open question for us.  As we have argued, the collective weight of a long history weighs heavily on all of China, but mainland China and Taiwan have only been bound together under a unified structure of governance since 1683 when the Manchu Qing Kangxi emperor claimed sovereignty over the island.  Widespread Han colonization of Taiwan only began with Qing rule, and, evidently, the growth and geographic dispersion of indigenous Taiwanese populations on the island declined over the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries through the beginning of Japanese rule over the island in 1895.  It seems evident to us that, at the present time, the lingering presence of non-Han indigenous populations in Taiwan, collectively constituting less than three percent of the entire population on the island, is relatively inconsequential to the broader status of the Republic of China as an alternative regime exercising a claim to sovereignty over the island or, for that matter, over the Chinese mainland.  The lineage of the Republic of China, derived from its establishment in 1912 with the downfall of the Qing dynasty, constitutes its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan and over the totality of China, a claim disputed in full by the Communist Party and the People's Republic.  However, the continued existence of non-Han populations appears, in conjunction with various political currents sweeping across Taiwan, to be shaping a broader movement favoring independence for Taiwan from mainland China, prefigured on the rise of the Democratic Progressive Party led by sitting President Tsai Ing-wen.  Effectively, such an action would foreclose the continued fiction, initially forged by the ruling Kuomintang Party following its expulsion from the mainland in 1949, that the Republic of China exercises a claim to sovereignty over the mainland.  For our part, we find the notion that such a claim to sovereignty over the mainland could ever be meaningfully exercised by the Republic of China to be expressly absurd.  Conversely, if the Republic of China acts to divest itself of such a claim, then it would be precisely left to exclusively claim sovereignty over Taiwan against the counterclaim by the People's Republic to sovereignty over the island.  Notwithstanding the very evident threats from the government of the People's Republic and the leadership of the Communist Party that any effort by the government of the Republic of China to claim independence for the island would be tantamount to a declaration of war against the People's Republic, we, as a party, cannot abjure our unabridged support for democratic consensus in the assertion of sovereignty by any defined population and political jurisdiction on the face of the planet.  If, someday, the population of the Republic of China overwhelmingly supports the independence of Taiwan from mainland China through the democratic process, then we will support them by whatever means we have at our disposal, and we will work to make our support for the independence of Taiwan official foreign policy for the federal government of the United States.  Conversely, we continue to hope that political opinion and animosities harbored by populations and political actors on both sides of the Taiwan Strait will soften, that populations in Taiwan recognize, in part, the deep and enduring cultural and economic connections that they share with their neighbors on the mainland, and that the leadership of the People's Republic, in part, cease to envision an existential threat in Taiwanese independence meriting an exaggerated military response to any effort by leadership on the island to follow divergent paths in governance and to forge foreign connections beneficial to the futures of their constituent populations.  We do not know how relations between the People's Republic and the people of Taiwan will evolve over time, but we are hopeful that they will continue to respect the interdependent development of both and that they will never arouse a shattering of peaceful coexistence.    

A great many conservative and otherwise Euro-centric thinkers in the United States and throughout the West have, increasingly, emphasized their fears that we are presently entering into a prolonged struggle for political, military, and economic dominance against the People's Republic.  They discuss the inevitable start of a new Cold War with China.  We are, likewise, aware that certain nationalist voices within the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the government of the People's Republic have echoed such views from a Chinese perspective.  In our view, such opinions are fundamentally unhelpful and hinder efforts to reshape long term relations between China and the West.  It is quite evident that the People's Republic is destined to become a dominant economic force in the global economy of the Twenty-first century, transcending, in part, the dominance of the United States.  As intellectual descendants of a broader revolution in thought that gave rise to the view that an open, free trading global economic system held out the promise of mutually beneficial development for every nation, we are not threatened by the economic rise of China.  We absolutely welcome it as condition through which China and the West can develop deeper connections of interdependence, in turn reducing the prospects of pointless military conflict and the futile, exploitative uni-directional economic dependency of chronic under-development.  We welcome the People's Republic as a partner in the economic futures of our sovereign American states.  Conversely, we hold out hope that the government of the People's Republic will eschew the impulse to convert its economic strength into military prowess beyond the needs imperative to secure its territorial integrity and security.  

We harbor enthusiasm for the idea of the Belt and Road Initiative to forge improved geographic connectivity between the economy of the People's Republic and its Eurasian neighbors through infrastructure investment, even as we recognize a potential for the People's Republic to leverage its financial relations with states receiving Chinese economic assistance as a means for advancing the global strategic initiatives of the People's Republic.  It would, to a great extent, amount to blatant hypocrisy on our part if we did not recognize the many ways in which the United States and other Western states have facilitated imperialist economic relations with developing states through which we have held vast corners of the planet in a permanent state of under-development and dependency on the capital resources of the West.  In this respect, it might be fair to argue that the People's Republic is simply joining the club, but we are, in turn, hopeful that China's influence and, especially, its nominal commitment to ideological foundations stressing the global unity of working people might yet help to change the rules of the game internationally, empowering diverse nations in the developing world to engage in new, mutually beneficial international economic relations especially by virtue of the investments made by the People's Republic in critical infrastructural connectivity.

We have witnessed the beginnings of a trade war between the United States and the People's Republic in recent years, driven in part by the continuity of state developmental policies in China favoring capital investment by domestic firms over foreign rivals and, in part, by structural rigidities hampering the growth of consumption expenditures in the People's Republic relative to investment in productive capacities.  Moreover, we recognize that the issues raised by producers in a number of American industries regarding Chinese governmental policies concern the long term trajectories of globally extensive supply chains in which we continue to envision a robust domestic American role even as Chinese actors play an ever larger role in reshaping the geographic dispersion of production and investment.  As we have already argued here, it is our intention to definitively strip the federal government of the United States of any role in determining trade policy for each of the sovereign state governments.  Rather, we will control trade policies for ourselves in Massachusetts and we will engage in negotiations with foreign trading partners directly, subject, in turn, to the limitations and restrictions established by multilateral trade agreements to which we aspire to become signatories in place of the federal government of the United States.  We look forward to constructive economic diplomacy with the People's Republic, singularly or in collaboration with certain other states with similar economic interests to our own, but we will remain mindful of the circumstances that have prompted trade conflicts between the United States and China at the present moment.  In particular, we will set definitive limits on the capacity of Massachusetts firms to engage in technology sharing with partners in the People's Republic, especially in circumstances when technologies have been developed with assistance from the government of the Commonwealth.  As we have argued, we are not enthusiastic about tariffs or other restrictions on imports, but we will invoke the tools at our disposal, subject to the retrospective approval of Congress, to ensure that our domestic economy is not left to languish under unfair competition from firms in the People's Republic or from anywhere else.  

It is manifestly clear to us that a multitude of ideological differences separate us in the West from the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the government of the People's Republic, even to the extent that many of us might expressly sympathize with profound expanses of Marxist thought.  Practical questions of governance and economic development are perpetually shaped by divergent historical and cultural contexts.  As Americans, we can never approach the world as contemporary Han Chinese thinkers and practical policy makers bearing the weight of over three thousand years of history and its insurmountable influence on the present.  Conversely, we bear the weight of our own revolution, all of its liberal ideological points of reference, and the work of over two hundred years of American statecraft and economic development.  It is certain that we will always find points of difference in international relations and global strategic interests between ourselves in the United States and the government of the People's Republic.  Emphatically, we will neither tolerate the interference of Chinese governmental actors in our domestic political processes nor will we permit Chinese agencies to exercise censorship, implicit, explicit, or otherwise, of the speech and expression of citizens and other private parties within this Commonwealth, whether or not such actions are directed in criticism toward the actions of the People's Republic, its government, or the Communist Party of China.  Rather than approach the future with premature and naive prognostications of blissful diplomatic and economic relations between China and the West, we would simply convey our commitment to work for peace and mutually beneficial relations, acknowledging our concerns for the range of issues that we have addressed here with regard to the actions and policies of the government of the People's Republic and of the leadership of the Communist Party of China.  We, of this party, will never count ourselves among the camps of Sino-phobic militarists in Washington, contemplating the potential for long term active confrontational relations with China and the potential for a direct military confrontation between forces of the United States and the People's Republic.  We will forever seek to remain diplomatic and collaborative with the People's Republic, but we will not surrender our values, our principles, or the compulsions motivating us to protest certain Chinese actions and, if necessary, to support the leveraging of force against the People's Republic in the interest of defending the national security of our Commonwealth, of our countrymen across the United States, and of our allies.  

        

The Retreat of Secularism in India and in Turkey and the Problems of Sectarian Exclusivity

As we have so far acknowledged, we are and will remain supporters of the exercise of democratic sovereignty by citizens of every nation.  We have, however, likewise asserted that we count ourselves as children of the Western Enlightenment, its commitment to the moral freedom of individuals and to the possibilities for mutually beneficial cooperation between individuals as the foundational ethic underlying  community, and the overriding virtue of public secularism, minimally, as a basis for unifying diverse communities transcending ethnic, racial, and sectarian boundaries.  In these terms, every compromise of the principle of secularism exudes a corrosive impact on the democratic process among citizens, shattering the unity of a polity forged through constitutional belonging.  If we currently entertain our own fears for the degradation of public secularism across the many more conservative corners of the United States, and such fears have critically shaped the political project advanced by this party relative to the institutions of American federalism, then we are similarly concerned about the erosion of secularism in other nominally democratic states throughout the world, especially among nominal American allies.  In particular, we harbor significant concerns about the degradation of secularism in the world's largest democracy in India under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its effects in stimulating ethnic-nationalist conflict throughout South Asia, from the local, grassroots level through the level of international military confrontation.  Additionally, we harbor concerns regarding the fate of constitutional secularism, curtailing of political opposition, and aggressive military actions against ethnic minorities in Turkey under the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP).  In these regards, we feel compelled to articulate the particular nature of the threat to democratic governance, political stability, and to the promulgation of our own American political ideals among foreign states that we would seek to include as our allies that we find evident in the current political trajectory of both these states.

At the outset, the Indian BJP has emerged from a long history of Hindu nationalism, dating back to Indian independence from British colonialism and the birth of the modern Indian state.  Succinctly, BJP and its predecessors in Bharatiya Jana Sangh have continuously existed as the Hindu nationalist other to the more committedly secularist Indian National Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru.  Its intellectual and political forebears like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee rejected the principle of secularist compromise in defining citizenship in the new constitution of India, in particular, relative to the Indian Muslim minority.  They sought to define Indian citizenship in relation to the struggle for independence not merely from Western imperialism but also in relation to centuries of Muslim political domination under the Moghuls, reemphasizing the centrality of India's Hindu heritage and religious ideals.  As such, they have repeatedly exercised a supportive role in periodic episodes of anti-Muslim popular violence across numerous Indian states, most notably in recent times in the violent demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in the city of Ayodhya in 1992.  And, under the leadership of Modi, they have altered rules for naturalization of migrants from other South Asian states to the detriment of Muslims and stripped the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region of its autonomous political status, reorganizing the region as a pair of states under direct administration from the federal government of India while simultaneously suspending the political and civil liberties of its residents, cutting off diverse means of communication, and detaining substantial numbers of political leaders in the Muslim majority region.

For our part, we would attest to our ready opposition to radical Salafism wherever it appears, and we would certainly not count ourselves as friends of the diverse Salafist terrorist organizations that have periodically struck at civilian populations within India, often in response to recurring episodes of anti-Muslim violence by Hindu nationalists otherwise supportive of the BJP and its partisan standpoints.  It is emphatically evident to us that we in the West have been best served by public tolerance for the free exercise of faith by diverse sectarian groups, even insofar as we would readily admit that we have rarely realized such an ideal to an adequate degree even here in Massachusetts.  If the partisan thinkers of the BJP would have it that the Western liberal commitment to secularism subjected every one of our citizens to a vacuous conception of citizenship, grounded exclusively in an empty, abstract common belonging to a social contract reflected in our constitutions, then we would counter that the ideals of sectarian identity as the preeminent marker of belonging conveyed by the BJP in relation to the broader population of India amount to the enunciation of a permanent sectarian civil war and the preemptive labeling of a significant minority as permanently alien and despised by its countrymen.  We would further attest that it is beyond our purposes here to question the nature of citizenship for hundreds of millions of Indians, but we will make it clear that the perpetuation of violent antagonism between the various sectarian and ethnic populations of India can never serve, in our opinion, the broader interests of the United States or of our Commonwealth, relative to either our national security or our economic well being in interaction with a dynamic and growing economy of India.  Rather, if the BJP has adjudged that continued Indian economic vitality can only be better served by whipping up internal antagonisms against minorities as a driver to a defiantly anti-Muslim revanchist ideology of Hindu political and entrepreneurial empowerment, then we suspect that we, our citizens, and our business enterprises will have little to gain from investment in India.  More minimally, we will not betray our own liberal ideals by validating sectarian division as a ruling ideology in India or anywhere else, and we will actively challenge any efforts by the federal government of the United States to act as a diplomatic or military partner to any government of India under the leadership of the BJP or any other like-minded Hindu nationalist party that might rise in its wake whenever it finally falls out of favor, as we suspect it will.

Something would invariably be left amiss in our considerations of sectarian governance in South Asia if we were not to consider India's South Asian Muslim adversarial other, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.  In this regard, we harbor significant concerns over the course of relations between Pakistan and the federal government of the United States, especially relative to the ongoing conflict over Afghanistan.  It seems relatively clear that democratic institutions in Pakistan are perilously shallow and that any reliance on good faith cooperation from the civil institutions of Pakistan, much less the Pakistani military and intelligence services, is liable to be misplaced.  We wonder how many American servicemen and women have died at the hands of Salafist militants trained, financed, and armed by the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) agency of Pakistan.  Direct involvement by the ISI in training and arming of Afghan Taliban forces seeking to undermine the US backed government of Afghanistan is scarcely a secret.  If we would ever have to entertain the possibility that erstwhile allies receiving foreign assistance from American tax payers were offhandedly stabbing us in the back, then we would be more suspicious about any efforts to establish deep and enduring ties with such partners.  Acknowledging the fundamentally sectarian character of the present constitution of Pakistan and the need to exercise nuance and realism in foreign relations, especially in regard to foreign states with recognized offensive nuclear weapons capacities, we would minimally urge caution in the efforts of the federal government of the United States to deal with Pakistan and to broker peace in relations between the latter and India, especially when domestic politics across South Asia are veering in the direction of unrestrained sectarianism.  Succinctly, we are hopeful that the two great nuclear military powers of South Asia will continue to play nice with each other, of their own volition and in their own mutual self-interest, that they will seek to peacefully resolve the conflict over Kashmir, and that they will mutually realize the pointlessness of stoking sectarian tensions among their respective populations as if mutually beneficial and sustainable economic and social development across South Asia could be best attained through domination by a single state and a single sectarian grouping.  Moreover, if other regional players, like the People's Republic of China, choose to actively play favorites in South Asia in the interest of their own short term strategic advantages, then they will have themselves to blame for stoking political instability inside and between India and Pakistan, as well as for nurturing external hostilities with individual parties to the Indian-Pakistani relationship.  If we have our way. then we would have the federal government of the United States keep South Asia in general at arms length for purposes of diplomatic and military policy and, for our own purposes in the states, leave us to define the terms under which we are willing to forge economic relations with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other South Asian states to the benefit of our citizens and to the benefit of peaceful economic development for our foreign partners.

              

We have already stated our reservations about the current political turn in Turkey motivated by the partisan rise of the AKP and Erdoğan.  In our view, the ongoing transformation of politics in Turkey since AKP first came into power in 2003 reflect a pernicious mix of positive, broad-based social welfare enhancing policies alongside an evolving breakdown of state secularism, prioritization of Turkic ethnic-nationalism in both domestic and foreign policies, and constitutional centralization in the hands of the national state and its executive as principles guiding Turkey's future.  Insofar as we recognize that a need has existed for a range of political reforms in Turkey for some time, strengthening civilian democratic institutions relative to the military, tackling political corruption, and simultaneously addressing a range of social welfare needs within the broader Turkish population, effectively distributing the gains to economic liberalization and export-driven growth across the wider population of the country, we harbor significant misgivings regarding the manner in which AKP has sought to address these needs.  It has manifestly appealed to an image of the role of Islam in public life wholly inconsistent with the secular Kemalist constitutional foundations of the modern Turkish state, principles that sought to situate Turkey within the political culture of Europe and that made Turkey a ready partner of the West at the margins of the Muslim world.  On the contrary, AKP has consistently courted a larger role for political Islam, originally in cooperation with the Gülenists and more recently with the support of the Salafist Muslim Brotherhood.  To whatever extent AKP leadership have asserted the party's fidelity to the constitutional principles of secularism, it is quite evident that the party has maintained a solicitous stance relative to the most conservative corners of political Islam if only because they represent a reliable base of support for the party's policies.  This support is most problematic to the extent that the transnational influence of political Islam is corrosive to liberal constitutionalist principles wherever they are enunciated.  We will elaborate our views on political Islam and Salafism in particular subsequently, but in the particular context of Turkey, a NATO ally, an erstwhile aspiring member of the European Union, and a Muslim majority state with a Western, liberal constitution, any flirtation by dominant national political authorities with policies that would open the door to enforceable institutions of sharī'ah law would evoke a broader breakdown of public secularism.  Furthermore, if its initial efforts to forge an alliance with the Gülenists at least held the virtue of inter-sectarian conciliation and cooperation as foundational principles for an outward looking and collaborative ethic in Islamic thought, then AKP's more recent rupture of relations with the Gülenists and their embrace of Salafist groups, even moderate ones, suggests a more categorical antagonism with non-Muslim and more emphatically secularist populations within Turkey.  In these regards, we are concerned that Turkey is presently sliding away from the West and toward the mire of anti-liberal sectarian ideologies characterizing so much of the Islamic world.   

As we have already argued, moreover, we are concerned regarding the resurgence of Turkic ethnic-nationalist ideologies spurred and codified through policy by the AKP.  Like other nations that we have already discussed, the encumbrance of history weighs heavily on certain segments of the Turkish population, and it intermingles with imageries of a glorious, expansive imperial Ottoman past and the sectarian dominance of the caliphate.  Among such groups, the very suggestion that Turkey should be held liable for a supposed Armenian genocide is anathema, and the thought of Kurdish political autonomy, let alone democratic sovereignty, constitutes an existential threat to the Turkish state.  To the extent that AKP has appealed so successfully to such an audience, it has facilitated a destabilization of inter-ethnic harmony across the geographic and ethnic landscape of Turkey and contributed to a broader pattern of inter-ethnic struggle in the strategic space of Northern Syria, Iraq, and Northwestern Iran.  And, at least as significantly, the federal government of the United States has helped to facilitate such a struggle by bending to the will our Turkish allies against Kurdish autonomy, labeling the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK, Kurdistan Workers' Party) a terrorist organization and otherwise enabling the Turkish government and military forces to wage aggressive warfare against Kurdish populations not only within Turkey but across the frontier with Syria.  In these regards, we, of this party, fervently support regional political autonomy for Kurdish populations within Turkey and, similarly, the maintenance of political autonomy for the Kurdish majority regions of Iraq and establishment of regional political autonomy for Syrian Kurds.  Furthermore, in the future, should these separate regional ethnic segments of the broader Kurdish population choose, independently or in cooperation with each other, to establish a sovereign Kurdish state on the lands which they presently occupy as majority ethnic groups, then we will support them and we will urge the federal government of the United States to adopt support for Kurdish sovereignty as official foreign policy.  In addition, we support recent acknowledgements by the federal government of the United States that the forced relocation of Armenian populations in Anatolia during the 1910s constituted a genocide at the hands of Turkic majority groups.  We have no intention of submitting to any protests from the government of Turkey or the leadership of AKP regarding our critical views on Turkic ethnic-nationalism and, as we have above argued, we would question the maintenance of membership for the federal government of the United States in any security alliance with the present government of Turkey.  We remain hopeful that the present stage of partisan politics evident in Turkey today will pass in favor of more liberal, secularist policies, open to the regional autonomy and broader inclusiveness of non-Turkic groups contained within the land space of Turkey, but, in the event that a shift away from AKP remains elusive, we will implore the federal government of the United States to maintain a substantial distance in our relations with the present government of Turkey. 

Reiterating our concerns for the South Asian states and for Turkey, we understand that, at this moment in history, we are confronting a larger reconsideration of various elements of Western culture as they have affected diverse corners of common humanity.  In this sense, a resurgence of sectarian influences on the political life of many nations, in place of liberal constitutional commitments to secularism may, in some sense, convey itself to a broader dynamic of opposition to Western influences on non-Western social formations.  Far be it for us to oppose anti-colonialism and the struggle against Euro-centric thinking at the margins of the West, but it is our position that, as committed defenders of the Western Enlightenment and its effects on public and political life everywhere, we cannot stand by and watch the worst, most socially inflammatory and antagonistic patterns of sectarian ideologies nurtured within nominally democratic systems and allow them to break down the commitments of foreign governments to forge inclusive and secular constitutionalist conceptions of citizenship and belonging across the various sectarian and ethnic groupings constituting their polities.  Minimally, we will not allow the federal government of the United States to approach such governments as unproblematic allies and partners to the foreign policy goals of the United States when, by their very actions, they undermine the political values under which we have been constituted as a nation and, in relation to us, magnify our own inter-regional, inter-ethnic/inter-racial, and partisan fault lines.  In conformity with these sentiments, we are hopeful that the broader populations of the South Asian states, and most especially India, and that of Turkey will undertake a reconsideration of their sectarian turns in the interest of forging closer relations to us and to nurture national political cultures that welcome a diversity of sectarian and ethnic identities at variance with those in the majority.

Salafism and the Evolving Place of Political Islam at the Margins of the Muslim World 

We have repeatedly cited, in this document, our concerns regarding the rise of Salafism in the Islamic world and its impacts on the United States, our allies, numerous adversaries, and the world writ large.  At this point, we would be amiss if we did not specify what we understand to constitute this set of sectarian ideas, why we find it socially poisonous, at every level of intensity in its articulation, not only for the Islamic world but for every corner of common humanity, and why we are committed to confronting it and defeating it wherever it arises in the interest of our own self-defense and that of the Western liberal democratic project of the Enlightenment throughout the world.  In this respect, we would concede, with the Salafists and with supporters of diverse currents of sectarian and ideological thought arising at various moments in the history of common humanity, that our commitment to the broader political corpus of the Western Enlightenment, including not only liberal constitutionalism but also public secularism and the appeal to common humanity as unity of the species reiterated at the level of every individual national context, is conceived, on our part, as a commitment to global revolutionary transformation, against which all other competing erstwhile universals must be displaced.  We are decidedly not ideological relativists with regard to the success or failure of liberal democracy as a model for every society on earth.  Similarly, we conceive of Salafism, as we will define it, as one among many competing models of universal truth and social action militating against the force of liberal ideas in the Islamic world and elsewhere, and, as such, we consider the success of Salafist ideas, as arguments regarding the organization of diverse national social formations, to be fundamentally incompatible with the universal acceptance of liberal ideas.  If, in this respect, we understand the very real threat of violent action by militant Salafist organizations throughout the world to be symptomatic of the broader problem posed by Salafism in general, then we further understand that such violence is nurtured in every national context where the imposition of sharī'ah law is enabled to take precedence over the capacity of individuals to stand as agents of free conscience before inclusive and secular institutions of law and citizenship.  In these terms, we emphatically understand that secular liberal democracy and Salafism are mutually incompatible, and we stand for the victory of liberal democracy everywhere.

Situating our larger argument regarding its origins, Salafism is a fundamentally theocratic idea originating at a particular moment in history for particular reasons.  It is a comparatively recent reaction to the catastrophic collapse of Islam as a dynamic faith tradition in the Thirteenth century and to the rise and fall of sterile, conservative political Islamism as it developed under the imperial Ottoman caliphate in the period since the Thirteenth century.  It hearkens of a return to vigorous, uncompromising, evangelizing zeal of the first two centuries of Islam, of a time in which the soldiers of God swept from the Arabian peninsula across the deserts of North Africa and throughout the Levant, into Anatolia and across the Straits of Gibraltar into the Iberian peninsula.  More concretely, it scorns the turn in history to the age of Islam's enlightenment, to the integration of Classical Greco-Roman ideas with the monotheistic theologies of Islam and to the full flourishing of Muslim intellectual thought, to the spontaneous and culturally eclectic spiritualism of Sufism, to advances in algebra and astronomy, to classical Islamic art and poetry, and to everything that Islam came to represent in the world and to its vast multitude of converts on the eve of its collapse as the West's most dynamic religious legacy.  When the Mongol hoards breached the walls of Baghdad in 1258, everything that Islam had become in the passage of centuries since the time of the Prophet Muhammad was reduced to dust, only to be succeeded by the rising political, economic, and technological prominence of the Christian West.  Salafism, as a mode of rethinking the Sunni Islamic tradition, seeks to argue that every instance in the incorporation of new ideas by the converts to Islam over the course of the faith's intellectual golden age was a wedge between the faithful and their God, from whom submission alone in accordance with the Qur'an was demanded.  Every time adherents of the Taliban movement in the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan sever the hands of a thief within their jurisdiction, it is with recourse to the strictest reading of the Muslim holy texts, to the Qur'an and to the Hadith of Muhammad, that they exact punishment, in the knowledge that generations of equivocation on strict adherence to sharī'ah were to blame for Islam's submission to the infidels.  What the Salafists demand is a renunciation of the intellectualism of modernity and all of its secular political trappings in favor of the pure piety of a harsh desert religion.  Furthermore, it is not adequate to posit strict adherence to the piety of the first generations of Islamic followers in Muhammad's wake for the Muslim ummah (i.e. the Commonwealth of believers) in regions of the world where Muslims reside as a majority of the population.  Rather, as Muslims have come to reside in regions far afield from the cradle of the faith, the demand for adherence to sharī'ah becomes a global political argument and a call to arms in defense of this return to the piety of the first generations and a call for evangelization by force among the non-believers.  

In point of fact, we acknowledge the essentially defensive nature of the invocation of sharī'ah by moderate Sunni Salafist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhoods, who seek to enshrine their ideas by means of democratic political contestation in places like Egypt and Turkey.  We acknowledge, in these terms, the pivotal role played by moderate Salafists in pragmatic alliance with liberals during the Arab Spring, helping to topple dictatorial regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and contesting the Ba'athist dictatorship of Syria.  If democratic self-determination was the sole operative principle underlying political Salafism, then we would scarcely hold grounds to criticize it except as pure cultural imperialists, asserting the absolute supremacy of liberal secularism and the innate inferiority of sectarian-driven politics.  Muslim communities, however they internally conceive of the moral obligations to the faith among the faithful, should have an unabridged right everywhere on earth to construct the sectarian institutions of their choice to enforce the dictates of the faith among their willing and devout adherents.  On the contrary, we question the capacity of Salafist adherents to disentangle the call to evangelize from ideological appeals to violent action in defense of the faith against non-believers, in Muslim majority states, at the geographic margins of the Muslim world, and in non-Muslim majority states.  When militant Salafists like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria forcibly convert minority Yazidi populations subjected to their rule in northern Iraq to Islam, when Boko Haram militants in Nigeria forcibly convert kidnap Christian school girls to be married off to Muslim patriarchs, and when Salafist adherents in London, Paris, Frankfurt, or Toronto assault and kill non-believers while invoking the name of God and of the Prophet, we find it difficult if not impossible to conceive of any margin for ideological compromise with Salafism, to excuse abject brutality in the name of cultural self-defense, or to construe any legitimate geographic boundaries in our understanding of where the Islamic ummah might conceive of its capacity and willingness to exercise a politically significant role in constraining the rights of free people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to exercise their own conscientious beliefs.  In our estimation, Salafism, as a mode of conceptualizing Islam, represents a categorical challenge to liberal secularism, and we will fight it whenever and wherever it manifests itself.     

Taking attention to detail in drawing distinctions between the moderate Salafism of the Muslim Brotherhoods and of other sectarian Sunni Islamic political movements, like Gülenism, and the violent, non-state militancy of Salafist organizations like the Islamic State movement or the al Qaeda network, it is clear that we cannot paint every manifestation of Sunni Islamic political organization broad brush and that our strategies and tactics in approaching and countering political Islamism globally must consequently vary.  Emphatically, we harbor certain concerns about Turkish Gülenism, but it appears, at least at face value, to embody a commitment to coexistence and equality between Islamic and non-Islamic constituents to a sovereign polity.  In this respect, it might be to the detriment of the wider Muslim world that the Turkish AKP government has specifically targeted supporters of Gülenism for repression.  Similarly, we might comprehend a place for moderate Salafists to participate in democratic politics, as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt had sought in the immediate aftermath of Mubarak's overthrow, but we would certainly interpret the institutionalization of certain Islamist political innovations as publicly sanctioned sharī'ah courts to be fundamentally corrosive to liberal secularism as a guiding principle for the maintenance of an inclusive and democratic polity.  The propriety of the Egyptian military's overthrow of a democratically elected moderate Salafist government in 2013 continues to raise questions for us.  To what extent can we feel at ease knowing that the single greatest defender of secular liberalism in the largest country of the Arab world is the officer class of its military?  In some respects, we certainly recognize a level of hypocrisy on our part if we do not stand committed to the democratic principle in majority Islamic states even when the majority stands for the most blatant anti-liberalism, the denigration of political rights for women, and a return to the sorts of rigid hierarchies of Sixth century sectarian religious institutions as foundations for a re-imagining of the state.  It seems clear to us that the federal government of the United States needs to fundamentally reconsider how it approaches the  states of the Muslim-majority world and, most especially, the Arab world.  Over time, we cannot find ourselves as allies to military strongmen like Mubarak and al-Sisi or to fervently anti-democratic monarchical regimes like the Gulf emirates and the House of Saud.  The determination of the American diplomatic community to maintain regional political stability and to enable the most minimal liberal compromises in states deprived of widespread rights to democratic participation for citizens by enabling vicious political repression of democratic activism is everywhere fueling Salafism.  

At this moment, we cannot offer any clear answers on how to chart a new course in our engagements with Muslim-majority states, but it seems clear to us that, to the extent that we remain active in the politics of Southwest Asia, we need to engage more constructively to shape civil societies against the influence of the Salafists, even and especially the moderate ones, and we need to stand perpetually in favor of greater, not lesser, democratic inclusiveness.  We must support the political inclusion and social emancipation of women, however the imperatives of their faith shapes the unique nature of Islamic feminism and defines the terms under which women engage as full-fledged citizens in their national social formations.  And there must be profound and radical economic transformation, delivering to the poor and to the disenfranchised the chance of a better life, and we need to be the most committed global defenders of such changes.  Notwithstanding our own determination to step back militarily from Southwest Asia, we cannot afford to give away the entire field of political initiative in reshaping the Arab world against both the Salafists and other outside powers, most notably the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China.  In the near term, it is clear that every base of repressive governmental violence in the Arab world demands its own privileged source of international patronage to secure its continued capacity to forestall democracy and enduring, inclusive and uplifting economic reform, a pattern most evident presently in Assad's Syria but no less true for the House of Saud, its neighbors around the Persian Gulf, and the present Egyptian military regime of al-Sisi.  We need to exploit every available vehicle of inclusive community to propel an enduring social transformation of the Arab world, a new Arab spring that will never be stifled either by the sectarian conservatism of the Salafists or by the violent repression of erstwhile dictators and their security forces.  The day of the military strongmen and of the repressive and obscenely wealthy monarchies in the Arab world must soon pass in favor of real democracies in which liberal parties stand a legitimate chance to steer their nations forward in a liberal and multi-lateral world.

 

Before we conclude here, we must consider, among Sunni Salafism's sectarian Islamic antagonistic others, the religious militancy of revolutionary Shi'ism as it exists in the Islamic Republic of Iran.  In this regard, a great many strategic thinkers across the West seem to equate the threat of militant Salafism with that of revolutionary Shi'ism or, minimally, construe the nature of the threat posed by the development of networks of Iranian proxies across the Muslim world in terms similar to those posed by the lingering Salafist al Qaeda network or the Islamic State movements.  Such evaluations seem to arise, in our understanding, from a range of misconceptions and overriding strategic imperatives that enable otherwise educated observers of the Muslim world to gloss over relevant differences between divergent sectarian and ideological currents.  We would beg to differ on this point.  Revolutionary Shi'ism, both as a set of theocratic ideas foundational to the governmental structure of the Iranian regime and as a theological movement addressing the broader future of Islam, conveys a discretely national imagery, centered in Iran and, at most, evident among other majority Shi'a states like Iraq.  It is not and has never been a body of ideas seeking to steer the religious practices of tens of millions of followers across the world in the same sense that Salafism has addressed itself to faithful Sunnis with a call to wage jihad against the infidels.  At worst, Iranian support for regional proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine has constituted an acute and transitory hindrance for certain American diplomatic objectives in Southwest Asia.  For our part, we are satisfied that the sectarian authorities in Tehran represent a legitimate threat to the political stability of the larger Southwest Asian region but it is a threat that can be managed with recourse to diplomacy, acknowledging the strategic imperatives of the present Iranian regime, our own, and those of our regional allies.  These imperatives may manifest acute incompatibilities that only resolve themselves through peripheral military engagements, but we would minimally be satisfied to see no direct military encounter between the armed forces of the United States and those of Iran.  If our erstwhile allies in Israel and in Saudi Arabia choose to embark on direct military engagements with Iran, then we will leave them to their own devices to resolve their own antagonisms with the Iranian regime without the benefit of American military assistance.  As we have already argued, it would certainly be to our advantage to take the steps necessary to solicit a full-fledged Iranian return to the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), controlling the pace and direction of Iranian nuclear development for the near term.  More generally, however, the time has come for the federal government of the United States to take a generous step back from the military struggles of Southwest Asia, and this is nowhere truer than with regard to our evolving relations with the regime in Tehran.  The present course of the bloodbath in Yemen between Iranian and Saudi proxies could never have been allowed to arrive at its present stage of misery in the absence of our active and tacit support of the Saudi military's actions in that country.  In the future, we will not enable our erstwhile allies in Southwest Asia to commit atrocities against humanity with weapons systems that we have supplied to them.  More generally, we would be satisfied in agreeing to disagree with the ruling sectarian political authorities in Tehran on the nature of their domestic political system and in conceding that our mutual best interests with regard to the political alignments in Southwest Asia might be better served through more regularized diplomatic engagement rather than prolonged recourse to costly and pointless low intensity military struggle.

On the other hand, we will certainly not tolerate the invocation by Iranian religious authorities of fatwa, promising the execution of extra-legal death sentences against our citizens for supposed crimes against the Islamic ummah or against the laws handed down from God through his Prophet.  The citizens of our Commonwealth will perpetually stand at liberty to speak their minds through the media at their disposal and to create artistic works that attest to their creativity and their conscientious translations of reality, notwithstanding any offense that they might inspire across the space of intellectual discourse and/or popular media.  They will be free to coin and publish their own satanic verses and to draw satirical images of the Prophet if they find meaning and inspiration in such actions.  We will not tolerate efforts by any party outside of Massachusetts to censor our citizens, whether from the Ayatollahs in Tehran, from the cyber-network feeds of errant Salafist organizations in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in Beijing, or from isolated millennial cults of Last Day Christians in rural corners of Utah or Montana, and we will hold any party that utilizes physical violence to execute extra-legal sentences against our citizens for the free expression of their ideas wholly accountable for the purposes of exacting punishment by the authorities of our Commonwealth by whatever means necessary.  

We seek to assert, in the clearest terms possible, that we are not enemies of Islam or of any other faith tradition or of any other body of thought that seeks to situate humanity in relation to the universe and to posit meaningful guidelines on how human beings should pursue lives of purpose and moral conviction.  In our understanding, the deeper meaning of the Islamic concept of jihad ultimately resides in the timeless ethic of struggle against the willful compulsions of the flesh and against every element of life that corrupts the potential of humanity to live lives that evoke personal moral fortitude and an unabiding thirst for social justice.  We could not submit any more positive ethic to convey to all humanity and to serve as an example of the virtue of a life committed to ones faith.  Conversely, as children of the liberal Enlightenment and of our revolution, we as strenuously defend the separation of religion from the sphere of public deliberation in all matters of state.  If the exercise of political power all too evidently invites the corruption of every moral virtue through the pursuit of self-interest by those in positions to exert their will as state policy, then every mingling of religion into the practices of government must transform the former from an expression of personal faith into another object of repression against the unwilling.  Moreover, we cannot return from our present age to one in which every nation existed in some bubble of cultural autonomy.  We stand as members of Common humanity in a world shaped by diverse manifestations of globalization, and we struggle to define the terms through which we will interact with all our neighbors across the geographic spaces of human habitation.  In this manner, we adamantly attest that Muslims here and throughout  the world will perpetually be welcome in Massachusetts to live lives committed to their faith and to stand with their fellow citizens, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, in the fully secular sphere of our liberal and democratic Commonwealth.  We will respect no establishment of religion by government, and we will work to create a world in which the mutual independence of religious faith and governmental practice is everywhere respected.

 

The Lingering Problem of Israel-Palestine

In conceiving and advancing our broader partisan project, we have consigned ourselves to a number of realities in the world that we cannot change, regardless of our best progressive commitments to transform the world for the better.  Our commitment to transform the Constitution of 1787 in order to significantly dis-empower the federal government relative to the states was born of a conviction that we cannot change the reactionary predispositions of a large minority of our countrymen and that their determination to stifle the formulation of needed policy measures at the federal level must compel us to enact radical constitutional changes in order to enable the states to enact such policy measures individually in accordance with the will of the majority.  Fully acknowledging our own incapacity to work with large numbers of our countrymen on such policy areas as climate change, the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, or rising economic inequality, we are not ignorant of pervasive incompatibilities in the construction of democratic consensus between competing groups at a national level.  With these considerations in mind, our best progressive democratic inclinations would have led us to conclude that only a single-state solution in Israel-Palestine configured on rigorously secular and liberal constitutional principles would satisfy the interest of establishing a durable and just resolution of the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs over the broader land space claimed by both.  Sadly, in view of our own experience of the intractability of our countrymen to share political power and resolve our differences by means of compromise, we now realize that, at least at this moment, a single-state solution, sharing of power between Jews and Arabs, and realization of political compromise in Israel-Palestine is not possible.  As such, we now find ourselves in the position of a great many outside observers of the facts on the ground in Israel-Palestine and in that of at least some of the more marginalized participants to the struggle for power in this region, notably the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements.  We are compelled to develop compromise approaches to the problem of Israel-Palestine that acknowledge our inability to forge peace on grounds that conform to our own political convictions.  We are forced to accept some version of a multi-state solution that will guarantee the existence of a sectarian Zionist state and that of at least one sectarian Arab-Islamic state.  We seek, in this section, to formulate our larger position on the establishment and legitimization of Israel, on its relations with the Palestinian Arab people who occupied Palestine under the political domination of other states minimally for centuries in advance of the establishment of the Zionist state in 1948, and on the various problems implicated in the potential establishment of a Palestinian state, especially those involving the geographic and partisan divides among the Palestinians.     

To begin, we would adamantly attest to our own blame for the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine.  That is to say, liberals, progressives, and radicals like us never paid sufficient care and attention to the integration of Jews into the national cultures of the Western European states and of the United States in advance of the Jewish Holocaust.  If we had been more categorical in insisting that Jews belonged as full-fledged citizens of Germany, France, Britain, and the United States in equality with their Gentile countrymen, then perhaps the German National Socialists in the 1930s would never have had adequate credibility to convince a majority of the German people that their nation's problems could all ultimately be traced to the Jews.  Moreover, in the aftermath of the slaughter of six million Jews at the hands of the German National Socialists, we lacked either the willingness or creativity to conceive of some broader regime of reparation to be extended, within each of the post-war states, to our Jewish populations or to those that remained alive from the Eastern European states in which a majority of the murdered had resided.  By admission, the history of the early post-war world and, especially, of the beginnings of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc was complicated.  However, the resolution of the United Nations to partition the region of Palestine, existing previously as a British protectorate under mandate from the League of Nations in 1923 as a post-Ottoman partition, into Jewish and Arab zones was secured with the approval of both the United States and the Soviet Union.  Rather than concede a broader culpability for what had transpired in German hands, the wartime allied powers and victors utilized their power within the newly established United Nations to divest themselves of their roles in the lingering and self-made Nineteenth and Twentieth century Jewish problem by creating a state out of land they had no right to partition in which to export their willing Jewish populations, presumably on the assumption that they could wash their hands of any responsibility to guard the rights of their remaining Jewish populations to be free to exercise their faith and live in equal standing before the law, political culture, and everyday life with their fellow non-Jewish citizens or, further, to make amends for generations of anti-Jewish discrimination, pogroms (whether under the sanction of the state or under its passive acquiescence), and diverse manifestations of collaboration with the executioners of the Holocaust.  The establishment of a Zionist state was committed as a one-time repayment for all sins perpetrated by the Christendom against Jews for all time.  If, in these terms, the Holocaust was, to a significant degree, an emergent consequence of our willingness, as liberals in the West, to overlook casual and more systematic discrimination against our Jewish populations, then we in the United States were as culpable for what transpired as were the German people, as we are similarly culpable for what transpired generations ago against our African-American populations.  Conversely, we had no right to resolve our culpability for the Holocaust by transferring a segment of our populations abroad onto land that was not ours to give any more than we had a right to establish an African-American state in West Africa in the Nineteenth century to export our freed slaves onto someone else's lands.  

We acknowledge the intellectual sources of Zionism, as an ideology centered on the necessity of Jewish national sovereignty on a defined geographic space, and we further understand why such an ideology might have been justified as national political cultures in Europe evolved over the course of the Nineteenth century to increasingly exclude Jews as members of diverse European societies.  The Jewish question, as it was posed by innumerable political thinkers, was never resolved in a manner that might enable Jews to find themselves as full fledged members of any European society at the beginning of the Twentieth century.  In this respect, luminaries of Zionist thought like Herzl could only conclude that Judaism had no place in European culture, notwithstanding the high-minded ideals of the secular Enlightenment.  For the first generation of Zionists, Judaism's survival depended on separation from the Christendom although it never posed the occupation of Palestinian lands as an ultimate goal of Zionist activism.  The realization of the Jewish Holocaust as a culmination of various strands of anti-Jewish ideologies in Europe and in the West, more generally, was both the vindication of Zionism as a necessary response to such ideologies and practices and the actualization of the separation of Jews from the national landscape of Europe by means of mass murder.  It, thus, achieved a partial precondition of Zionism.   

With these considerations on the justification of Zionist ideology in mind, in the period preceding the partitioning of Palestine by UN resolution, the British had no right to extend a blanket invitation, through the Balfour declaration, for Jews from all over Europe, America, and the rest of the world to come to Palestine, liberated from the Ottomans, to establish it as a Jewish national homeland.  If Israel was a fact on the ground in advance of the UN resolutions of 1948, then it was because Jews were invited to come and to violently displace Arab populations that had lived in the region for centuries by the British in 1917.  We are compelled, in these terms, to respect the reality that we see today in Israel-Palestine by virtue of the unlawful actions of imperial colonizers from a century ago.  The roots of the conflict that we today witness are not centuries old.  They are grounded in the actions of Zionist settlers and their British facilitators in the 1920s and 1930s, and, fundamentally, they involve a broader national liberatory struggle against Western colonization, however much the struggle waged over Palestine has largely been exercised on the behalf of Palestinian populations by other regional Arab states.  In Israel, the British established what King Richard the Lionheart could not build in his lifetime: a durable and long-lived Crusader state in the Islamic Levant to guard over Jerusalem on the behalf of Christians everywhere.  One can scarcely doubt that conservative Evangelicals throughout the United States enjoy such a strong connection with the cause of Zionism because of their millennial hopes for the Second Coming of Christ to a Jerusalem in Israeli hands on the last days.   

If we rejected the outright legitimacy of the Zionist state, then we would stand entirely outside of the larger American political establishment, to the extent that American politics at both the federal and state levels has increasingly been shaped by both domestic and foreign Zionist financial patronage.  Furthermore, we cannot ignore either the basic facts on the ground or the initial procedural legitimation of Israel by virtue of the partition resolution from the United Nations.  We are compelled to accept certain elements of the political reality of the world, and the existence of Israel, as culmination to the Zionist political project, is among those elements.  Conversely, there are a range of policy parameters, susceptible to our political contestation, that are liable to impact the existence of Israel as we understand it.  Emphatically, we will not support any level of continued military assistance from the federal government of the United States to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and we will deny the federal executive branch from extending any discretionary funds through defense allocations to support Israeli military expenditures.  We will not stand by as funds from American tax payers bankroll the progressive occupation of lands outside of the 1967 boundaries of Israel proper by recourse to militarized violence against Arab Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  

If we are willing to extend to Israel the basic legitimacy of its pre-1967 land holdings, then we wholly reject the legality of every seizure of lands, whether by the Israeli government and military or by private parties of Jewish settlers with the blessing of the former, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  Similarly, we reject any claim by the Israeli government to the territory of East Jerusalem.  If we acknowledge, in these regards, that Jews should have an unfettered right to worship at religious sites contained within the space of East Jerusalem, then we likewise remain committed to the principle that Jerusalem must remain a shared space for Jews, Muslims, Christians, and all of common humanity even as East Jerusalem is returned to the sovereignty of a formal Palestinian state.  With regard to other lands seized by the Israeli military over the last three decades of the Twentieth century, we remain sympathetic to Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights as a matter of national security for Israel, especially as the Ba'athist regime of the Assads remains in power in Syria and remains under the influence of Iran.  We acknowledge, in this respect, that Israel continues to exist in a dangerous world and that a sovereign Zionist state must be adequately equipped to secure its existence over time as external threats evolve.  Notwithstanding these concerns, a clear difference exists between the threats manifest from certain of Israel's neighbors, especially Syria and Iran, and the threat manifest from the legitimate efforts of Palestinians, of every partisan color, to secure the minimum terms necessary to establish one or more viable and sovereign Palestinian states.  

No viable and sovereign Palestinian state will ever be secured on territory in the West Bank among parcelized, spatially discontinuous enclaves, mutually isolated by networks of Jewish settlements, checkpoints of the Israeli Defense Forces, and physical barriers, constructed to intentionally deprive the Palestinian people of any capacity to organized a coherent and governable sovereign state.  The formal and internationally recognized existence, heretofore, of a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, as an ostensible partner in peace negotiations against the government of Israel, has, in these regards, served to legitimize the long run reduction of the geographic sphere of practical Palestinian authority to an archipelago of Bantustans, subject to the continuous domination of the Israeli government, Israeli Defense Forces, and the indignity of land seizures by private parties of Zionist settlers.  No permanent peace between the Israelis and Palestinians will ever be achieved in the absence of the full clearance from the West Bank of every Zionist settlement not formally recognized by the Palestinian Authority and subject to the continuous authority of a sovereign Palestinian state, without recourse to the government of Israeli or the Israeli Defense Forces.  As such, we remain committed to the principle that the sovereign geographic boundaries of the state of Israel must be limited to the pre-1967 space of Israel proper.  If the government of Israel was to itself commit to the clearance of Jewish settlements from Palestinian lands outside of the pre-1967 boundaries, then we would support the extension of financial assistance from the federal government of the United States to construct habitable spaces and infrastructures to ensure that displaced Jewish populations and future Jewish immigrants to Israel might be suitably relocated within Israel proper.  If we reject the categorical terms of the classical Zionist proposition and of any sectarian political state, then we nonetheless recognize that we have to live with the realities of the world and that Common humanity has certainly benefited in certain ways and will continue to benefit in the future from the existence of a viable, sovereign Israeli state.  Subject to the qualifications that we have issued here, we will support the continued existence of Israel.

     

If we harbor numerous grievances over the actions of Israel and with the foundational principles of any sectarian state, then we similarly harbor misgivings about the potential for a sovereign sectarian Arab Palestinian state.  To begin, it is quite evident that no possibility of a contiguous geographic space of sovereign Palestinian authority exists.  The West Bank and Gaza Strip are geographically separated by areas of uncontested sovereign Israeli political control.  There is no meaningful way to connect these spaces.  Moreover, the geographic divide between the West Bank and Gaza has helped to nurture a broader partisan divide between the territories.  Political dominance of Hamas in Gaza would have been unlikely to occur if Fatah had been able to readily exert the legitimacy of their majoritarian rule over the Palestinian Authority in both territories.  The mutual geographic isolation of the West Bank and Gaza helps to ensure that the Palestinians are divided on partisan lines.  In this respect, we question the possibility of a single sovereign Palestinian state.  If, in the end, a durable peace can be established between Israel and the Palestinians, then, in our view, it is irrelevant whether such a peace is achieved with one or two Palestinian states.  If the realization of sovereign authority by the Palestinians, under the acceptance of their Israeli neighbors, achieves the creation of political institutions that can serve the needs of their constituent populations, especially with regard to economic development, then it should not matter whether these needs are secured by one government or two.  As secularists, we certainly find a clearer partisan connection to the political philosophies embodied by Fatah, and we clearly believe that Fatah's engagement with the peace process might have been more productive in serving the interests of their constituents in the West Bank had not the Israel Likud government of Netanyahu been so determined to reject the peace process and pursue widespread seizure of Palestinian lands in recent times.  On the other hand, we cannot disregard the ostensible democratic mandate enjoyed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.  In our view, the federal government of the United States must recognize the facts on the ground with respect to the political divisions among the Palestinians and make palpable efforts to engage proportionally with both Fatah and Hamas in the interest of bringing all parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict together to achieve a durable peace.    

In view of our previous reflections on Salafism, we would have adequate reasons for wanting to distance our support from Hamas, as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhoods.  As we argued above, we certainly harbor a closer affinity to Fatah, but we also have to recognize that the problem of Israel-Palestine might be a special case, at least in the near term.  We would be more enthusiastic about having the federal government of the United States working to forge diplomacy between Israel and a unified, secular and liberal or socialist Palestinian Authority, but this option is simply unavailable to us.  We recognize that any efforts by Hamas to moderate their rhetoric on the introduction of sharī'ah into the institutions of civil government in the territories under their control are likely to be window dressing for the international community.  On the other hand, the underlying sectarian political ideologies espoused by an organization representing a large subset of the Palestinian population need to be taken in context as a particular dimension in an international power struggle where the critical starting point is the principle of Palestinian sovereignty and all other questions can be addressed at a later date.   

Conversely, it remains clear to us that the militarization of the Gaza Strip, both by the Hamas government and by non-governmental militant Islamist groups, must stop.  Gaza cannot remain a perpetual violent thorn in Israel's side against which vastly disproportionate force of arms is periodically levied against one of the most densely populated spaces on earth in an effort to dissuade Hamas and other militant parties from building improvised rockets to lob at Israeli civilians.  The recurring struggles between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces are profoundly responsible for the destruction of infrastructures necessary for basic human habitation in Gaza and, hence, for the manifestly brutal existence of Gaza's residents.  We cannot be more emphatic in arguing that the government in Gaza must police all non-governmental militant actors in the region, direct any available resources entering the region into the reconstruction of civilian infrastructures and away from the construction of tunnels to evade Israel Defense Force actions, and pursue diplomacy to heal the rift between themselves and Fatah and achieve, over time, better terms for an enduring peace with Israel.  If the federal government of the United States signaled intentions to extend the removal of Hamas' designation as an international terrorist group in exchange for concrete efforts by Hamas to move in this direction, then we would be hopeful that progress might be made in this direction to the larger benefit of the population of Gaza.

We cannot conceive of an exact plan to bring Israel and the competing Fatah and Hamas factions of the Palestinians together to establish an enduring peace.  At the outset, it is clear that permanent resignation to the partitioning of the land between Israel and Palestine must be accepted by all parties.  The hope for a single state is definitively dead and must remain so.  As argued, moreover, Israel must be made to accept the pre-1967 borders of Israel proper.  Jewish settlement in the West Bank and at the edges of Gaza must stop, and Jewish settlers that choose to remain outside of Israel proper must accept Palestinian rule.  East Jerusalem must be handed back permanently to the Palestinians.  Furthermore, Arab-Israeli citizens aside, Palestinians must renounce any claims to land in Israel proper, however well documented such evidence might be for ancestral land holdings.  Conversely, we would support Israeli efforts to resituate Jewish settler populations from the occupied territories and Palestinian efforts to welcome the Palestinian diaspora home.  Arab Palestinian families residing in refugee communities in Lebanon, Jordan, and numerous other places may never recover their ancestral properties in Israel proper, but we will push the federal government of the United States to provide financial assistance to the future governments of one or more Palestinian states to provide secure housing for Palestinian populations returning from abroad.  Finally, and conclusively, we, in Massachusetts, will open our doors to Israeli Jewish and Arab Palestinian populations that seek to depart permanently from the region and from the lingering legacy of struggle and animosity between intransigent populations.  We definitively cannot repay the debt incurred from hundreds of years of Antisemitism against Jews in the West in advance of the Holocaust.  Nor can we make amends to the Palestinian people for the permanent partitioning of their home country.  We can, however, do our best to make a place of peace and a new home for those who choose to leave Israel-Palestine and who simultaneously respect our institutions and the broader commitment that we share for the future development of our Commonwealth in a liberal, secular world.    

Economic Development and the Future Global Political Integration of Sub-Saharan Africa

The status of relations between the United States and the many, diverse states of sub-Saharan Africa is complicated and not easily reducible to generalizations on patterns of economic or political development.  It would be an emphatic understatement to argue that this region remains significantly marginalized, both with regard to the diffusion of wealth and investment of capital and with regard to global political influence.  For our part, we lack any defined plans for engagement with particular states in sub-Saharan Africa, but we feel inclined and justified in identifying a number of principles that we would affirm as necessary to the engagement of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and of the federal government of the United States with states in this region.

We will continuously acknowledge the sovereignty of the states with which we engage in diplomatic discussions, and we will simultaneously seek to balance our comprehension of the democratic mandates wielded by particular governments against the claims exercised by rival entities, representing particular tribal, ethnic, or sectarian groups.  That is to say, we have to acknowledge that a great many sub-Saharan African states continue to exist as contingent assemblages of divergent groups, brought together under unstable constitutional institutions.  We will be compelled to take such institutions at face value, at least provisionally, not questioning the historical and legal/constitutional terms under which particular groups have been assembled into not always coherent wholes.  Moreover, we cannot afford to play favorites in the internecine partisan struggles of such states except insofar as the particular dimensions of a conflict begin to assume the characteristics of genocide.  In these terms, we certainly have in mind the ethnic struggles that arose in the Great Lakes region in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s.  The ethnic struggles that arose between Hutus and Tutsis in these countries were immensely complex and not amenable to simplistic generalizations, but, even to the extent that we seek to remain even handed in dealing with warring parties in individual states, we cannot allow slaughters of the dimensions that occurred in the 1990s to ever occur again in the Great Lakes region or anywhere else in Africa.  We recognize a responsibility for the federal government of the United States to work as a partner with the African Union, with our European allies and, most critically, former colonial overlords like the French Republic, and with other states through the aegis of the United Nations to ensure that no ethnic conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa can ever again degenerate into genocidal violence.  

We acknowledge the recent history of American military involvement in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular our involvement in policing actions in Somalia.  The disintegration of central governance mechanisms in this country in the mid-1990s and the rise of diverse competing regional factions made it especially vulnerable to the development of violent Salafism, evident in the growth of al-Shabaab.  The latter certainly remains a persistent threat to stability in the East African Horn, most critically in Somalia and in bordering areas of Kenya into which Somali refugee populations have fled.  Additionally, Salafist militant groups, some nominally associated with the Islamic State movement, have most recently proliferated in Northern Mozambique, and the Salafist Boko Haram movement in Northern and Eastern Nigeria and Northern Cameroon continues to constitute a threat to liberal, secularist governance and sectarian pluralism in numerous Central and Western African states.  As we have argued, we consider Salafism as a critical threat to liberal, secular democracy everywhere in the world where it appears, and we are committed to struggling against it by whatever means necessary.  In so arguing, we likewise acknowledge that the struggle against militant Salafism cannot always be prosecuted directly with recourse to military arms or fought directly by American military forces.  As we argued that the federal government of the United States needs to take a step back from military engagement with the Southwest Asian region, we similarly recognize that it would be a mistake to impetuously begin new military interventions in sub-Saharan Africa.  We will closely evaluate the potential for various forms of intervention in the struggle against Salafism in sub-Saharan Africa, and we will not categorically rule out direct US military involvement, but we will be weary of the potential for military involvement to provide long term resolutions for the problem of militant Salafist violence across sub-Saharan Africa.  Rather, as in every other corner of the Islamic world, the best resolution of sectarian violence exists in a deepening and strengthening of the democratic process, stability of liberal constitutional institutions, and inclusive and broadly encompassing economic reform, facilitating a long term increase in living standards for both urban dwellers and populations living in rural areas.                

We manifestly support the introduction of liberal, secular, and democratic constitutional institutions in every state in Africa and in every state throughout the world in which they do not currently exist.  In this regard, we are profoundly hopeful for the ongoing transition of governance practices in Sudan, as an offshoot of the broader democratizing dynamic of the Arab Spring, away from long-existing Salafist dictatorial rule.  We are also wholly supportive of every African state with a history of faithful adherence to liberal constitutional institutions, even under circumstances where multi-partisan contestation of elections is less than robust.  We are hopeful that multi-partisan electoral contests will become more regularized over time in states like Zimbabwe and the Republic of Congo.  We acknowledge that single-party dominance in such states is ingrained in a long history of post-colonial governance, and, at least in certain circumstances, one-party rule has facilitated significant realization of social and economic developmental objectives, but long-term development of the democratic process demands the accommodation of robust and formally integrated opposition to one-party rule.  In this regard, we will support any diplomatic efforts made by the federal government of the United States to enhance democratic practices in sub-Saharan Africa and to ensure that citizens across the states of the region enjoy ready access to partisan vehicles for participation in governance.  Similarly, we acknowledge that, in certain contexts, incontrovertible differences between central governments and populations of particular regions have given rise to localized independence movements.  While we cannot, from our vantage point, adequately adjudge all of the circumstances that might have given rise to particular independence movements, or the propriety of such movements relative to that of the central governments they oppose, or their fidelity to democratic representation of the interests of their local populations, we can certainly understand that governance in post-colonial Africa, inclusive of the terms of territorial integrity imposed on local populations by overarching colonial independence movements, might have functioned to permanently disempower and marginalize the populations of particular regions, undermining realization of long term developmental objectives that might have otherwise constituted a suture for institutions of post-colonial national citizenship.  Effectively, some regions have suffered internal colonization by governmental authorities in their national capitals from whom they enjoy no meaningful opportunity to shape the terms of their own governance and the direction of their social and economic development.  In these terms, we sympathize with the population of the Ethiopian region of Tigray and with the objectives of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) to forge independence from the Ethiopian central government and claim their sovereignty, even as we similarly hope that differences between the TPLF and Ethiopia's central government will be peacefully resolved without recourse to armed violence.  We similarly support the opposition of Anglophones in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon against the dictatorial rule of President Biya's Rassemblement démocratique du Peuple Camerounais (RDPC), and we would support efforts by Cameroonian Anglophones to forge independence for their regions from the central government in Yaoundé or, more minimally, to establish a more definitive federalization of the government of Cameroon, recognizing the permanent right of local self-government by Anglophones in their regions in relation to the Francophone national majority.  We would also support the efforts of the local population the Angolan enclave of Cabinda to seek independence from the central government of Angola.  More generally, we, as a party, will commit to support the realization of localized democratic self-rule in Africa and everywhere else in the world, both as a potential vehicle for the success of a liberal, secular, democratic world order and as the best means for facilitating enduring and uplifting social and economic development against the worst tendencies of governmental corruption, plutocracy, and economic deprivation.  We will demand the same as official policy for the diplomatic community of the federal government of the United States.

This document cannot adequately formulate a detailed blueprint for the future economic and political development of sub-Saharan African states, for the future of liberal democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, for the future integration of individual sub-Saharan African national economies into the broader structures of inter-regional commodity supply chains, or even for the future role of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in securing objectives conducive to the mutual benefit of our citizens, those of the other American states, and those of our partners in the various states of sub-Saharan Africa.  We recognize that diverse political and economic currents, complicated in turn by the continued effects of a global pandemic, would render any such blueprints meaningless.  Conversely, we would attest to the principled necessity that future relations between each of the American states, both independently and through the strategic and diplomatic vehicles levied by the federal government of the United States, and the states of sub-Saharan Africa must respect the sovereignty of all parties and that we increasingly recognize the growing interdependence of all national economies across the span of Common humanity.  We will participate in the future economic and political development of the larger sub-Saharan African continent and in that of individual states, but we will only do so in ways that will simultaneously respect the needs, interests, and sovereign prerogatives of our partners in sub-Saharan Africa and our own commitments to supporting liberal democracy, secularism, and progressive and broadly inclusive economic development.  

        

Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua as Rogue Socialist Regimes in the Realm of American Hegemony

The future of a handful of states in the Western hemisphere, nominally organized in fidelity to socialist ideologies to the detriment of American foreign policy and the extension of free commercial interaction, needs to be briefly considered here.  In this regard, we are, of course, referencing the enduring socialist regime of the Castros in Cuba, the Bolivarian revolutionary regime begun by Chavez and continued by Maduro in Venezuela, and the lingering quasi-socialist, authoritarian regime of Ortega in Nicaragua.  Each of these regimes presents their own unique problems and possibilities for the United States as a whole and for our Commonwealth in particular.  For our part, we recognize that, so long as it remains the collective determination of the United States as a whole, through Congress, that the presence of these regimes remains a threat to the national security of the United States, we will be effectively barred from seeking a new direction in relations between ourselves and each of these states.  Conversely, we are adamant that a reappraisal of relations between the federal government of the United States and the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua should be advanced, in the interests of validating our own commitments to the individual sovereignty of every state in the Western Hemisphere, to the progress of democracy, and to the value of progressive economic integration of the Americas.

As we have argued above, many of us continue to harbor some affinity for the economics of socialism and, thus, for the experiments undertaken in these states to place the collective basic needs of their wider populations, inclusive of those of the poorest and least advantaged, above the needs of economic growth and market-driven entrepreneurial dynamism.  Indeed, we would not have advanced our own plans for the development of housing and food policies for Massachusetts had we not respected a broader imperative to secure the needs of our poorest and least advantaged populations whether through the mechanisms of the market, direct intervention by the state, or decentralized community-based initiative.  In these regards, we understand a common purpose in our conceptions on the efficacy of collective action on the behalf of our larger society relative to the efforts undertaken in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.  Conversely, we harbor strong concerns about the ways in which social needs have been addressed in each of these states and, further, on the extent of centralized initiative by the state in lieu of bottom-up community initiative.  More generally, while we respect the results of certain socialist policies in these states, we remain simultaneously critical of the incapacity of each to mobilize democratic participation such that all corners of society might be encouraged to take ownership for the collective success of ameliorating substandard housing, enhancing the income earning potential of impoverished rural communities, or establishing a high universal standard in the provision of nutritional support and access to basic health care across the broader population.  Moreover, the relatively closed nature of political participation in each of these states, most pointedly in Cuba, not only stifles the capacity for some segments of society to actively engage in democratic self-governance but also creates opportunities for nepotism and state corruption.  When the militant ardor of revolutionary generations abates, what remains is a one-party state, bereft of the capacity to think and conceive of new policy directions and new mechanisms to engage the broader population, inclusive of groups once opposed to socialism, and ripe for the nurturing of extra-legal privilege by party insiders at the expense of the broader population.  We, as a party, enthusiastically endorse broad democratic reform initiatives in each of these states if only to ensure that all segments of their societies can attest to meaningful opportunities for participation in directing the apparatus of the state toward the general welfare of all their people.  To us, this means, minimally, the right to multi-party elections.  Furthermore, the extension of a right to democratic engagement in the direction of the state would be meaningless in the absence of a general right for all citizens to speak freely, to criticize their government and its leaders, and to assemble freely to seek redress of their grievances.  We understand that each of these states has tread a long path forward from authoritarian repression and the presence of extreme economic inequalities, sustained, in turn, under the blessing of the federal government of the United States and under the auspices of American corporate interests.  However, we would be amiss in our reappraisal of each if we did not insist that they each move forward with the sorts of liberal political reforms that might ensure, both procedurally and substantively, that their governments embody the full sanction of their people to act in accordance with their democratic will.

With regard to Cuba, we understand the broader set of historical circumstances that have led to the island's relative political isolation within the Americas.  While we acknowledge, again, that we cannot unilaterally redefine the appropriate set of relations between the federal government of the United States and that of Cuba, encompassing the needs of continental security for all of the states, we simultaneously recognize that the nature of the military threat to the national security of the United States posed by Cuba has evolved over time and remains substantially asymmetric.  Cuba stands virtually alone in the realm of American political and military hegemony.  To whatever extent the government of Cuba seeks patrons critical of American hemispheric dominance internationally, the country remains vulnerable to changes in our collective will to recognize their sovereign capacity to govern themselves free from American interference.  In this respect, we intend to insist, contrary to the wishes of dispossessed first-generation post-revolutionary emigres and rabidly conservative, wistful, and nostalgic second-generation Cuban-Americans in places like Miami, that the federal government of the United States can issue no political preconditions for the restoration of full diplomatic relations and the reopening of international commerce between the United States and Cuba.  Were we not to insist of the sovereignty of the Cuban people against the threat of domination by the federal government of the United States, then we would hardly have ground to stand on short of abject hypocrisy in demanding the Constitutional restoration of our own sovereignty in Massachusetts.  If, in certain respects, we can sympathize with our Cuban-American countrymen in Florida and other states regarding the utter dissolution of their pre-revolutionary familial claims to private property on the island, then we must simultaneously recognize the reality of the revolution and its negation of certain property claims as a fait accompli, against which we have to move forward if we are to establish some meaningful bilateral relationship between the United States and the Cuban people, as they now exist, and their government.  Conversely, we support the development of multi-party democratic practices and the substantive extension of rights to free speech, especially in regard to the criticism of government leaders and institutions, for the Cuban people, and, if the federal government of the United States demonstrates a willingness to embark on diplomatic endeavors to support these ends relative to Cuba, then we will support such measures.  Definitively, we reject the notion that Cuba or any other state can be forcibly compelled to nullify the effects of over seventy years of social revolutionary progress and return to a set of pre-revolutionary social and legal relations by virtue of economic and political strangulation.  These policies have bred enmity toward the United States within the Cuban population at least as much as they have nurtured frustration that the revolution might never realize its promises for a brighter future for all Cubans.  We, of this party, remain confident that a place exists for cooperation between our Commonwealth, the United States as a whole, and Cuba to secure sustainable and equitable economic development for both of our populations, to support the establishment of liberal democratic practices in Cuba, and to share lessons offered by divergent paths in social development.

 

Democracy Across the Americas and the Relative Eclipse of the Roosevelt Corollary 

Foreign Aid and the Perpetuity of our Principled Global Political Objectives

We believe that economic development and the diffusion of wealth across globally extensive trading systems constitute ready vehicles for the maintenance of peace and the gradual extension of liberal democratic norms into otherwise closed and oppressive social environments.  Even so, we acknowledge that the particular forms of development that take root in each regional economic context will shape the effectiveness of income growth to uplift disadvantaged populations.  In too many places, American corporate investment in particular modes of economic development has perpetuated, rather than relieved, the impoverishment of local populations, either by virtue of strip-mining style strategies of corporate engagement with local economic actors or extreme exclusivity in the dispersion of benefits to local populations.  In many ways, the theoretic proposition that Western economic development has been presupposed on the construction of underdevelopment in other corners of the world has been proven sadly true.  In these terms, we have to differentiate between modes of economic development that privilege the short term interests of investors in advanced post-industrial economies over those of local populations in the developing world and alternative strategies that seek to build on the talents and localized resources of developing regional economies and to further establish globally extensive networks among developing economies that can propel a widely dispersed uplift of divergent, interconnected regional economic systems.  The idea of linking trading partners among developing economies is key to us, for diverse reasons but most critically because such networks would enforce mutually dependent development rather than a unidirectional dynamic of reliance on trading partners in advanced economies for solvent markets.  Moreover, while not expressly privileging subsistence-driven models of development over models oriented toward specialization at particular niches within global supply chains, we understand that economic development must take the fundamental needs of local communities seriously as the foundations for how development should proceed.  

Emphatically, in Massachusetts, we do not possess comprehensive knowledge of how we can best facilitate the democratization of economic development in the developing world, but we are confident that it will be grounded in the initiatives of native entrepreneurial actors and that we will have to do our best to participate as one among many potential sources of foreign capital for great local ideas among our neighbors in the developing world.  We will actively participate in aiding foreign economic development both through direct financial investment and through the assignment of professionals in a range of fields to directly assist foreign public authorities and entrepreneurs to develop infrastructure and begin productive community economic initiatives.  To manage these dual approaches, we would envision the creation of a bureau of foreign economic assistance for the Commonwealth akin, in certain respects, to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and, in other respects, to the Peace Corps.  In reference to the latter, we are not keen on the idea of relying on wholly voluntary human resources, but the involvement of younger enrollees to foreign developmental assistance programs would certainly be accepted as a means for fulfillment in public service requirements for universal basic income with the Commonwealth.  It will be our intention to approach foreign states and localities welcoming our assistance as the bearers of professional manpower resources, capable of contributing in myriad ways to arrive at practical solutions to local development problems.  

Support for global economic development, improvement of living conditions, health care, food security, availability of clean water/clean air for all humanity.  Progress toward a nuclear free planet, elimination of landmines, etc.

The Sovereignty of All Nations

Support for every people that declares its unique national existence.  Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica, Kurdistan, Kashmir, Cameroonian Anglophones, Chechnya/Dagestan, Donbas region, Nagarno-Karabakh, Taiwan.  American First Nations.     

Immigration, Borders, and the Singularity of Common Humanity

The United States is a nation of immigrants.  Aside from the descendants of indigenous peoples living within the land space of our republic, we all emerge from genealogical lineages that extend back into other national contexts.  Some of our ancestors came from the British Isles, either from the mother country England or from diverse Gallic ancestries in Scotland, Ireland, and other places.  Others came from lineages connected to the European mainland, from France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, or a great many other nations.  Still others are here because their ancestors were forcibly removed from their home continent in boats on the long and sorrowful middle passage.  They arrived in chains to staff households and cultivate plantation fields against their consent, but they now stand as free people with enduring aspirations for equality with their neighbors and countrymen.  And still others came and continue to come from a thousand different places around the world.  And sometimes when they arrive, they are scarcely seen as human by their American hosts.  They are relegated to the bottom of the economic ladder, with profound and frequently legal barriers to advancement and personal improvement in the land of opportunity and entrepreneurial virtue.  We pass laws against their entry, set limits on their numbers, and struggle to constrict the circumstances in which they can claim citizenship alongside their neighbors, even when their children were born on our sovereign soil.  We label them parasites and, for striving so intensely to make better for themselves, view them as an irredeemable public burden, an expense in public services that yields no benefit for the larger American polity, whether or not they take advantage of the largess of such governmental support.  And, quite frequently, we lash out at them.  We organize armed violence, both public and private, against migrant populations, ravage their persons and their hard earned possessions, and, sometimes, round them up and sequester them simply because they are different or because they arouse suspicion.  In a nation of immigrants, the first comers often slam the doors behind them and imagine that exclusion of the bounty in their possession, the product of common construction by generations of newcomers, both free and enslaved, is their native birthright.  

The open door of the Commonwealth in a nation of immigrants.  Building around new generations of immigrants, acculturation to a liberal political order and the centrality of community, collective work, and solidarity.  

The Relationships of the States

Cooperation, coalition building, collective projects with other state governments (especially on expansion of fiscal projects, health care systems, etc.).  Minimization of conflict, control of transit of populations across state boundaries/hard interior borders(?), interstate commerce conventions/internal tariffs(?), arbitration of conflicts within federal judiciary(?).  In the end, we are all countrymen with a collective history.

Our American Values and Ethics

Democratic governance, necessity of free speech, freedom of assembly and petition, freedom of conscience and exercise of religious belief, balancing individual autonomy and community belonging/solidarity, entrepreneurial liberty, support for the free market under active intervention of the state in the public's interest.  Hope for a future of peace, human freedom and social development.    

Free Markets, the Diverse Entrepreneuriat, and Socialism: Managing Social Well Being and Economic Liberty 

Free markets are a good but not an absolute.  Support the entrepreneurs, do not ignore monopolies, guard the well being of the entire body of citizens through robust collective (not all public) institutions.  

The New Citizen, Their Rights and Responsibilities in a Robust Democratic Order 

The citizen will be more than a voter: they will be actively engaged everyday in the creation of their world and the maintenance of their democracy.  New collective institutions.

A New Massachusetts Commonwealth in a New World

Looking forward to a brighter future with a more sincere commitment to democracy and consensus, openness to the world, active engagement in progressive change within and outside our borders.