I am writing this post as an effort to vent my recurring frustrations regarding my efforts to employ mass transit as a viable means to get from point A to point B in my day-to-day life. The story conveyed here is a piece of a much longer story, beginning about six years ago when, in the course of a teaching gig that I had down at Holyoke Community College, I got into a fender bender in a commuter parking lot with the last car that I owned, prompting me, for a long list of reasons, to seek alternative means of transit to private car ownership. I will have to elaborate on this story at some later date, but for now it suffices to say that I rely primarily on two distinct modes of automotive transportation to get from my home in the Baystate neighborhood of Northampton/Florence to work in West Springfield and to other locations that I might need to get to. I hold a membership with Zipcar, which is very useful if I need to utilize a car either to travel moderately long distances (e.g. Boston on Sundays when I can park for free in Newton, Bennington when I feel like hiking my favorite section of the Long Trail, etc.) or I just need some means of transporting things close to home when loading things on my back won't do (e.g. getting the air conditioner out of my storage box in Hatfield). However, I just don't have the means, income-wise, to use Zipcars everyday - my reservations tend to amount to a special treat for myself on a once a month basis. On an everyday basis, I rely on the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA), our local bus system for Hampden and Hampshire counties in the lower Connecticut/Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.
For the most part, the PVTA tends to serve my needs. If it didn't, then I would not have been able to make not owning a car work out living over twenty miles away from my workplace. On the other hand, there are recurring problems, many of which could be blamed on the performance of individual bus drivers. I rely on one particular transfer at the downtown Holyoke Transportation Center, from the 6:30PM Purple 20 bus (Springfield bus terminal to Holyoke transportation center via West Springfield) to the 7:30PM Blue 48 bus (Holyoke transportation center to Northampton Academy of Music, the last scheduled run of the night) to get home to Northampton after work at least three nights a week. Several Purple 20 drivers have succeeded in stranding me in downtown Holyoke for the night, forcing me to either walk 11 miles home (which, sadly, I did on one occasion!) or seek alternative means to get back to Northampton (e.g. call up my roomate, Joe, who has been extremely accomodating in giving me a lift back home when I most need one). By and large, however, I have managed to combine rides from coworkers, shuffle schedules, and utilize alternate bus routes to ensure that I can get to and from work when I need to and still take care of numerous other needs, including, most recently, food preparation for my father, who has been a widower since my mom passed away last year and still hasn't mastered the fine art of preparing supper outside of throwing prepared dishes into the microwave oven! Moreover, recent schedule changes for the PVTA have accomplished wonders in giving me new alternative means of getting from the Springfield area back up to Northampton, most notably the extension of the Red 41 bus schedule (Northampton to Holyoke Mall via Easthampton Center) to a location where it frequently though not always can connect with the Purple 20 from Springfield to get me back to downtown Northampton twenty minutes before the Blue 48. Of course, there are occasions in which events beyond my control manage to throw a wrench into my commute for reasons that truly cannot be blamed on any individual bus driver. Snow will fall during winter, traffic will get diverted by the Holyoke Saint Patrick's Day Parade, and motors on PVTA buses will unexpectedly overheat during August heat waves, but, for the most part, I've found ways to deal with or plan around all such excusable failures of the PVTA system.
Today represents one of those occasions when all my transit planning and calculations break down. As I am writing this post, I should have been enjoying Italian food and, quite possibly, small quantities of Italian wine down in Waterbury, Connecticut, at the Pontelandolfo Community Club Festa di San Donato with my friend, Kirk, who lives and works as a librarian in Naugatuck, the next town over. I had reserved a Zipcar for the purpose of getting myself down to Waterbury. However, in the interest of reducing the total cost of the rental, I developed a rather complex plan. Rather than simply reserving a car in downtown Northampton as I usually do, I decided to reserve an infrequently used Ford at Veterans' Park in downtown Holyoke, across the street from the Transportation Center. Being relatively closer to Connecticut, the mileage that I would have expended driving from Holyoke would have been less than what I would have incurred had I reserved a car in Northampton. Also, estimating that I would, at most, spend about two hours indulging on Calamari, Lasagna, and other regional delicacies at the festival, I limited my rental to 5 hours (Zipcars rent by the day or the hour and come with a limit of 180 free miles per rental). This should have given me a generous 90 minutes for each trip and two hours to enjoy myself. In hindsight, maybe I was cutting things a little close, but I can concede my frugal nature without embarrassment! Also, there probably would not have been a problem extending the reservation by half an hour if I was due to run a little late. The one possible wrench that could have disrupted the mechanics of my plan consisted of the fact that I would have to take the 12:00PM Blue 48 from Northampton down to Holyoke in order to get to my rental precisely at 12:30 when my five hours were due to start. At the close of my rental, I would have to take either the 5:30PM or 6:30PM Blue 48 buses back to Northampton. None of this seemed remotely problematic, however, when I initially made my Zipcar plans.
As it was, there was a major automobile accident on route 5, between Northampton and Holyoke. The Blue 48 was diverted, I'm guessing, through Easthampton and around the Northampton Oxbow. As a result, the 12:00 Blue 48 that I was waiting for to get down to Holyoke never arrived! The Blue 48 was not back onto its schedule until 1:00PM, at which point, I had already texted Kirk to let him know that there were to be no Canolis in my future today and called Zipcar to cancel my reservation 20 minutes after I was supposed to have picked up my car. It is difficult to attribute blame to anyone in this situation. I made my plans under uncertain knowledge that the Blue 48 would be running on schedule as it does every Sunday. The folks at Zipcar were nice enough not to charge me the full value of my five hour rental, although I did get socked with a fee for tying up a car for a couple of hours that probably wasn't going to be driven by anyone else for the remainder of the week. The individuals involved in the accident on route 5 certainly didn't leave their houses this morning planning to get into a major accident, with injuries, that would divert traffic flows, playing havoc with bus schedules among other things. Lastly, again, the PVTA tries its best to adjust to incidents that will obstruct bus services, but there are certain events that cannot be remedied. The one complaint that I might have concerns the fact that I took a FULL HOUR for Blue 48 service to be restored after the traffic diversion.
As a summary point in this respect, in most circumstance, I try to plan my transit usage in the area on relatively tight schedules, taking advantage of every opportunity to limit the amount of time lost from taking particular buses and arranging Zipcar reservations in order to minimize my rental costs from hourly charges and mileage. When I design a particular plan to combine PVTA travel with a car reservation, I need the plan to fall together like clockwork. That is a little bit more than I can expect from the dedicated but otherwise somewhat unreliable members of the PVTA. That is not to say that I think mass transit under the PVTA is a miserable failure or that bus drivers within the system are ambivalent toward the needs of individual passengers to get somewhere on schedule. It is, on the other hand, simply a fact that the system runs with given limitations in both rolling stock and manpower that hinder its ability to adjust to situations like a major accident on a key thoroughfair. As a result, attempting to coordinate my travel, especially in connection with my Zipcar use, against PVTA schedules requires a great deal more flexibility than I am willing to extend to the system or include within my travel planning.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
The Triumphant Power of Multilateral Diplomacy: Hopes for Success of the Iran Nuclear Deal
As an initial reflection, I neither know nor understand all of the conditions and provisions of the agreement negotiated between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the six-party (U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Russian Federation, and People's Republic of China) contingent, seeking to dismantle certain developments within Iranian nuclear research for an eight-year period, restrain the possibility of military use of nuclear technology by reducing stockpiles of fissile materials for fifteen years, and incorporate a rigorous inspections regime through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in return for selective relief on economic sanctions, enabling Iran to market larger quantities of petroleum products globally and to access certain financial sector resources previous closed by U.N. Security Council resolutions. On the other hand, the fact that such an agreement could be successfully negotiated through a patient, ongoing process of diplomacy between major world stakeholders in the interest of meeting Iran half way in developing a sensible set of restrictions on Iranian nuclear development in the interest of peace, stability, and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons represents a very hopeful outcome and a possible model for the resolution of other issues in Southwest Asia, notably the Syrian Civil War and the current geographical/sectarian fracturing of Iraq. To the extent that such issues might be introduced to a multilateral diplomatic methodology, it should also include a far more inclusive range of regional stakeholders (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, etc.), the exclusion of which might have been the very critical oversight that actually facilitated the realization of an agreement with Iran, per se!
I am confident that numerous barriers exist to the ratification and successful implementation of the agreement, both within Western governments and in Iran. In Washington, in particular, the Republican Senate majority will almost certainly oppose the terms of the agreement unanimously. The ultimate capacity of the Senate to impose legislative conditions on the Obama administration's ability to faithfully apply U.S. obligations, particularly with respect to relief of U.N. Security Council mandated economic sanctions on Iran, will, however, rely on the ability of Republican Senate leaders to enlist a threshold quantity of Democratic Senators to overturn a presidential veto on Senate initiatives. The major groundwork in this direction will likely be made by the Washington Zionist/Israeli lobby, determined to enforce the Israeli Likud government's categorical opposition to any deals with Iran over nuclear development that do not simultaneously include a recognition of Israel's right to exist. It seems almost certain that a handful of pro-Israeli Democrats, most notably Charles Schumer of New York, will side with Republicans in opposing any deal with Iran. While there is no guarantee that Obama will not encounter a veto-proof majority in opposition to a nuclear deal with Iran, it seems unlikely that the Zionist lobby will be able to yank ten to twelve Democrats out of Obama's camp. For a lame-duck president, Obama continues to command an adequate degree of loyalty among Democrats, solidified perhaps by the promise of a resurgence in Obama's presidential-year electoral coalition as a potential force behind Democratic candidates in 2016, to make it difficult for most Senate Democrats to turn their noses up at a major diplomatic achievement by a president whose foreign policy successes have been sparse. Similar struggles, however not as substantially impacted by the influence of Israeli political pressures, are sure to obtain in the British, French, and German parliaments. In particular, given recent setbacks in electoral support for the Hollande government, acquiescence by French legislators to an Iran nuclear deal would not seem to be a guaranteed outcome. On the other hand, given their proximity to Iran and the potential for European firms to profit from reintegration of Iran into various global markets, it would seem that Europe's stakeholders have much to gain from the successful ratification and implementation of an Iran nuclear deal.
Acknowledging my relative ignorance on the internal politics of Iran, it is my understanding that Iran's parliament will undertake debate on the agreement and that President Rouhani's moderate/centrist coalition currently enjoys a favorable balance in relation to hard-line Islamic revolutionary radicals. On the other hand, the ultimate approval of the agreement will rest in the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni and the net outcomes of parliamentary debate may fall on deaf ears. While it seems possible that Khameni would reject the inspections regime as a subversion of Iran's sovereign right to unfettered nuclear development, it seems more likely that rigidities on Iran's end will emerge over the term of the agreement, as IAEA officials begin to inspect nuclear facilities and construct a timeline of Iranian nuclear development to determine where nuclear engineers and scientists currently stand with regard to the enrichment of weapons grade uraniam and/or plutonium. In the near term, Khameni and the country as a whole stand to gain from ratification of the agreement and implementation of basic provisions to facilitate sanctions relief in accordance with preliminary timelines.
Concluding, I am not sure how good of an agreement might be under consideration here. In certain respects, I agree with the general purposes of nuclear non-proliferation and can understand how and why the development of weapons grade fissile material by Iran would introduce destabilizing dynamics to the region. Certainly, the potential for Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal would, on its face, represent an existential threat to Israel while simultaneously undermining Israel's current nuclear monopoly in the region. Of at least equal importance, it would introduce a nuclear dynamic into the Arab-Persian/Sunni-Shi'a political rivalry, almost certainly inducing Saudi Arabia to undertake its own nuclear weapons program. On the other hand, provisions within the current agreement apparently facilitating Iranian importation of a range of new conventional weapons systems after eight years of verified compliance with the nuclear inspections regime may induce a conventional arms race between Iran and the Sunni Gulf states. Either way, it is worth asking whether the U.S. and other Western partners to the nuclear agreement will be made manifestly worse by the progressive reintegration of Iran into global trade in petroleum markets and, secondarily, in international weapons trade (again, after an introductory period of compliance). For that matter, if we had walked away from the bargaining table, would an eventually nuclear-armed Iran truly represent a significant threat to the U.S., Great Britain, France, or Germany? I think the answer to both questions is no.
Truthfully, I do not think that regional peace has been well served by the maintenance of an Israeli nuclear monopoly in Southwest Asia - if such a monopoly has aided in preventing the recurrence of conventional ground wars between Israel and its closest neighbors, then it has done little to achieve a lasting peace between Israel and its Palestinian cohabitants to the militarily occupied, colonized spaces of the West Bank and Gaza. Moreover, it is questionable to what extent Iranian nuclear development has been driven by the presence of an Israeli nuclear monopoly as it has been induced by the existential threat of regime change against the Islamic Republic posed by U.S. Central Command! In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of 2003, the development of a tangible nuclear deterrent by Iran, capable of being employed against invading U.S. forces or against U.S. assets elsewhere in the world (to say nothing of developing a modest intercontinental nuclear capacity!), constitutes a completely rational response. In certain ways, any relaxation of weapons embargoes against Iran, however strictly regulated, might aid the Islamic Republic in meeting its objectives to maintain a substantial military deterrent against unilateral U.S. military operations. Beyond this, as a first step toward more cordial relations, an agreement between Iran and the U.S., however lodged in a multilateral context, might represent an open door toward other pragmatic diplomatic endeavors to realize other regional objectives. With this thought in mind, it is certain that the U.S. and Iran remain far apart in coming to terms with the present situation in Iraq (i.e. not only the current struggle against the Islamic State but also the long term political status of Sunni populations in Ninawah and Anbar provinces if the government in Baghdad is to remain decisively controlled by the country's Shi'a majority) and the fate of the Assad regime in Syria. On the other hand, if the present multilateral framework has facilitated a nuclear agreement, then maybe further negotiations in the same framework might at least begin to address these other problems.
Fundamentally, this Iranian nuclear agreement represents a defeat, however transitory, for the sort of political unilateralism favored in Washington by various leaders of the Republican Party (and at least some Democrats) and in Israel by the Likud government, suggesting that the only meaningful way to come to a resolution of the problem of Iranian nuclear development would be at the end of a gun. To the extent that actual diplomacy between negotiators at a bargaining table, under the principle of mutual respect for legitimate self-interests by all parties with a stake in the political isolation and/or reintegration of Iran into the global economy and the community of well-behaved sovereign nations, realized an agreement that seems likely to be implemented is good news for peace and the pursuit of more peaceful resolutions to intractable problems in Southwest Asia.
I am confident that numerous barriers exist to the ratification and successful implementation of the agreement, both within Western governments and in Iran. In Washington, in particular, the Republican Senate majority will almost certainly oppose the terms of the agreement unanimously. The ultimate capacity of the Senate to impose legislative conditions on the Obama administration's ability to faithfully apply U.S. obligations, particularly with respect to relief of U.N. Security Council mandated economic sanctions on Iran, will, however, rely on the ability of Republican Senate leaders to enlist a threshold quantity of Democratic Senators to overturn a presidential veto on Senate initiatives. The major groundwork in this direction will likely be made by the Washington Zionist/Israeli lobby, determined to enforce the Israeli Likud government's categorical opposition to any deals with Iran over nuclear development that do not simultaneously include a recognition of Israel's right to exist. It seems almost certain that a handful of pro-Israeli Democrats, most notably Charles Schumer of New York, will side with Republicans in opposing any deal with Iran. While there is no guarantee that Obama will not encounter a veto-proof majority in opposition to a nuclear deal with Iran, it seems unlikely that the Zionist lobby will be able to yank ten to twelve Democrats out of Obama's camp. For a lame-duck president, Obama continues to command an adequate degree of loyalty among Democrats, solidified perhaps by the promise of a resurgence in Obama's presidential-year electoral coalition as a potential force behind Democratic candidates in 2016, to make it difficult for most Senate Democrats to turn their noses up at a major diplomatic achievement by a president whose foreign policy successes have been sparse. Similar struggles, however not as substantially impacted by the influence of Israeli political pressures, are sure to obtain in the British, French, and German parliaments. In particular, given recent setbacks in electoral support for the Hollande government, acquiescence by French legislators to an Iran nuclear deal would not seem to be a guaranteed outcome. On the other hand, given their proximity to Iran and the potential for European firms to profit from reintegration of Iran into various global markets, it would seem that Europe's stakeholders have much to gain from the successful ratification and implementation of an Iran nuclear deal.
Acknowledging my relative ignorance on the internal politics of Iran, it is my understanding that Iran's parliament will undertake debate on the agreement and that President Rouhani's moderate/centrist coalition currently enjoys a favorable balance in relation to hard-line Islamic revolutionary radicals. On the other hand, the ultimate approval of the agreement will rest in the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni and the net outcomes of parliamentary debate may fall on deaf ears. While it seems possible that Khameni would reject the inspections regime as a subversion of Iran's sovereign right to unfettered nuclear development, it seems more likely that rigidities on Iran's end will emerge over the term of the agreement, as IAEA officials begin to inspect nuclear facilities and construct a timeline of Iranian nuclear development to determine where nuclear engineers and scientists currently stand with regard to the enrichment of weapons grade uraniam and/or plutonium. In the near term, Khameni and the country as a whole stand to gain from ratification of the agreement and implementation of basic provisions to facilitate sanctions relief in accordance with preliminary timelines.
Concluding, I am not sure how good of an agreement might be under consideration here. In certain respects, I agree with the general purposes of nuclear non-proliferation and can understand how and why the development of weapons grade fissile material by Iran would introduce destabilizing dynamics to the region. Certainly, the potential for Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal would, on its face, represent an existential threat to Israel while simultaneously undermining Israel's current nuclear monopoly in the region. Of at least equal importance, it would introduce a nuclear dynamic into the Arab-Persian/Sunni-Shi'a political rivalry, almost certainly inducing Saudi Arabia to undertake its own nuclear weapons program. On the other hand, provisions within the current agreement apparently facilitating Iranian importation of a range of new conventional weapons systems after eight years of verified compliance with the nuclear inspections regime may induce a conventional arms race between Iran and the Sunni Gulf states. Either way, it is worth asking whether the U.S. and other Western partners to the nuclear agreement will be made manifestly worse by the progressive reintegration of Iran into global trade in petroleum markets and, secondarily, in international weapons trade (again, after an introductory period of compliance). For that matter, if we had walked away from the bargaining table, would an eventually nuclear-armed Iran truly represent a significant threat to the U.S., Great Britain, France, or Germany? I think the answer to both questions is no.
Truthfully, I do not think that regional peace has been well served by the maintenance of an Israeli nuclear monopoly in Southwest Asia - if such a monopoly has aided in preventing the recurrence of conventional ground wars between Israel and its closest neighbors, then it has done little to achieve a lasting peace between Israel and its Palestinian cohabitants to the militarily occupied, colonized spaces of the West Bank and Gaza. Moreover, it is questionable to what extent Iranian nuclear development has been driven by the presence of an Israeli nuclear monopoly as it has been induced by the existential threat of regime change against the Islamic Republic posed by U.S. Central Command! In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of 2003, the development of a tangible nuclear deterrent by Iran, capable of being employed against invading U.S. forces or against U.S. assets elsewhere in the world (to say nothing of developing a modest intercontinental nuclear capacity!), constitutes a completely rational response. In certain ways, any relaxation of weapons embargoes against Iran, however strictly regulated, might aid the Islamic Republic in meeting its objectives to maintain a substantial military deterrent against unilateral U.S. military operations. Beyond this, as a first step toward more cordial relations, an agreement between Iran and the U.S., however lodged in a multilateral context, might represent an open door toward other pragmatic diplomatic endeavors to realize other regional objectives. With this thought in mind, it is certain that the U.S. and Iran remain far apart in coming to terms with the present situation in Iraq (i.e. not only the current struggle against the Islamic State but also the long term political status of Sunni populations in Ninawah and Anbar provinces if the government in Baghdad is to remain decisively controlled by the country's Shi'a majority) and the fate of the Assad regime in Syria. On the other hand, if the present multilateral framework has facilitated a nuclear agreement, then maybe further negotiations in the same framework might at least begin to address these other problems.
Fundamentally, this Iranian nuclear agreement represents a defeat, however transitory, for the sort of political unilateralism favored in Washington by various leaders of the Republican Party (and at least some Democrats) and in Israel by the Likud government, suggesting that the only meaningful way to come to a resolution of the problem of Iranian nuclear development would be at the end of a gun. To the extent that actual diplomacy between negotiators at a bargaining table, under the principle of mutual respect for legitimate self-interests by all parties with a stake in the political isolation and/or reintegration of Iran into the global economy and the community of well-behaved sovereign nations, realized an agreement that seems likely to be implemented is good news for peace and the pursuit of more peaceful resolutions to intractable problems in Southwest Asia.
Europe at all costs? Against the new Greek Bailout
Following from previous statements on this blog regarding the efforts by the European Commission and other actors to prevent a Greek exit from the Eurozone, the negotiated bailout extended to save the Greek banking system from insolvency is a bad deal for all parties involved, especially for Greece. The fundamental problem here remains the same: the inclusion of Greece and other weak, peripheral national economies in a unified currency zone with Germany and other relatively strong national economies generates conditions in which the stronger economies enjoy excess, uncompensated export benefits from implicit currency devaluation at the expense of rendering weaker economies at a permanent disadvantage from implicitly overvalued nominal exchange rates. The only thing that a new injection of borrowed funds from the ECB, IMF, and other Eurozone creditors, in exchange for a new round of austerity measures, will generate is the need for more injections in the future as a struggling Greek economy struggles more with no perceptible means of permanent relief. The Greek economy will never actually begin to turn around until the country dispenses with the Euro, reintroducing a new national currency or undertaking the creation of a new interregional currency consolidating national economies more complementary to Greece. If, in certain respects, the package of austerity measures that the Eurogroup is now imposing on Greece may be ultimately necessary and, perhaps, salutary to long term development of the Greek economy (something that is highly doubtful in regard to the imposed selloff of capital assets), then the resolution still leaves Greece with the biggest of all possible disadvantages, the inability to devalue its currency in order to realign the strength of Greek currency in relation to the country's export performance and the international marketability of its debt. Only an exit from the Eurozone can achieve this end!
The capitulation of Greek Prime Minister Tsipras to an austerity package at least as bad as the one the Greek electorate cast its consensus against is nothing short of stunning! Is it really possible that the international financial sector has this much power to threaten a national government with the incontrovertible demolition of its banking sector if it does not concede to measures guaranteed to inflict abject pain on the most vulnerable individuals in the country (i.e. pensioners who will be subject to significant cuts in benefits as one condition for the extension of new loans to Greece)? Tsipras should voluntarily step down from power for having surrendered Greek political and economic sovereignty to financial blackmail! More importantly, his government, from the point that it was initially elected, should have committed far more time, energy, and creativity to planning for the eventuality that Greece would be leaving the Eurozone and returning to an independent national currency. Its apparent failure to do so is manifestly inexcusable.
Again, an overarching problem in the engagement of Greece with the European Union as a whole is that the partial and unsatisfactory institutions of monetary union without a complementary union of centralized fiscal redistributive mechanisms and a banking union have revealed just how superficial the impetus for political unity in the place of national chauvinism actually is in Europe. To place the issue in an historical context more familiar in view of my American background, instead of creating a United States of Europe, the European Union has settled for something closer to an Articles of Confederation, in which the Germans remain free to abdicate their responsibilities for the failure of Greece to adequately adjust to a permanent appreciation in purchasing power and permanent inflation in the cost of Greek exports in the face of relatively competitive international commodity markets for Greek export sectors. A more robust union, including international fiscal redistributions from the strong to the weak national economies, has not been and will not become politically feasible - not at a time in which the Euroskeptics have grown so strong across multiple EU member states. Rather, it might be time for Europe to take a step back, scrap the single unified currency and, maybe (if policy makers continue to exercise some degree of creativity), restructure the Eurozone to incorporate multiple tiers with different consolidated currencies reflecting complementary macroeconomic performance among currency partners. More fundamentally, the political motivations that prompted currency consolidation in the first place (alignment of all member states to peaceful, interdependent economic development in place of destructive economic competition promoting militaristic nationalism) need to survive the breakup of the currency, which, for the sake of Europe's future, should now be inevitable! This, however, is a matter of ideological commitment between the various nations of Europe, militating against any resurgence of Twentieth century zero-sum political calculations.
The capitulation of Greek Prime Minister Tsipras to an austerity package at least as bad as the one the Greek electorate cast its consensus against is nothing short of stunning! Is it really possible that the international financial sector has this much power to threaten a national government with the incontrovertible demolition of its banking sector if it does not concede to measures guaranteed to inflict abject pain on the most vulnerable individuals in the country (i.e. pensioners who will be subject to significant cuts in benefits as one condition for the extension of new loans to Greece)? Tsipras should voluntarily step down from power for having surrendered Greek political and economic sovereignty to financial blackmail! More importantly, his government, from the point that it was initially elected, should have committed far more time, energy, and creativity to planning for the eventuality that Greece would be leaving the Eurozone and returning to an independent national currency. Its apparent failure to do so is manifestly inexcusable.
Again, an overarching problem in the engagement of Greece with the European Union as a whole is that the partial and unsatisfactory institutions of monetary union without a complementary union of centralized fiscal redistributive mechanisms and a banking union have revealed just how superficial the impetus for political unity in the place of national chauvinism actually is in Europe. To place the issue in an historical context more familiar in view of my American background, instead of creating a United States of Europe, the European Union has settled for something closer to an Articles of Confederation, in which the Germans remain free to abdicate their responsibilities for the failure of Greece to adequately adjust to a permanent appreciation in purchasing power and permanent inflation in the cost of Greek exports in the face of relatively competitive international commodity markets for Greek export sectors. A more robust union, including international fiscal redistributions from the strong to the weak national economies, has not been and will not become politically feasible - not at a time in which the Euroskeptics have grown so strong across multiple EU member states. Rather, it might be time for Europe to take a step back, scrap the single unified currency and, maybe (if policy makers continue to exercise some degree of creativity), restructure the Eurozone to incorporate multiple tiers with different consolidated currencies reflecting complementary macroeconomic performance among currency partners. More fundamentally, the political motivations that prompted currency consolidation in the first place (alignment of all member states to peaceful, interdependent economic development in place of destructive economic competition promoting militaristic nationalism) need to survive the breakup of the currency, which, for the sake of Europe's future, should now be inevitable! This, however, is a matter of ideological commitment between the various nations of Europe, militating against any resurgence of Twentieth century zero-sum political calculations.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Who won the American Civil War?
In the wake of a couple of months during which I seemed to lack the initiative to write about anything, I am hopeful that I am regaining the capacity to be needlessly long-winded in addressing numerous topics, most of which remain hopelessly abstract in their conception and connection to my everyday life, preparing marinated meat kabobs for July 4th celebrations in the lower Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. This particular post seeks merely to advance a contemporary question in regard to the supposed objectivity of American history at one its most calamitous moments. I intend to write at length on this topic when I have truly taken the time to approach it from all angles in order to produce a genuine piece of amateur historical analysis that could bore to sleep anyone unwilling to take for granted that the topic cannot be objectively answered at the present time. I am asking it, moreover, with the larger supposition/suggestion that we New Englanders, in particular, as American citizens, should really engage ourselves in debate over just what our history actually means. In doing so, it would be to our benefit if we took the liberty to throw out all of our preconceived notions of what has actually happened from the first moments of our revolution to the present day in order to truly open ourselves up to the possibility that everything we learned in history class was, sadly, erroneous.
As Southern Republican politicians now stumble to get out of each others' ways in denouncing the legacy enshrouded in Confederate battle flags and reassuring the rest of the country that the South has decisively transformed itself since the days of Jim Crow segregation and the high tide of mainstream Ku Klux Klan White supremacy, the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist-Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (as well as other suspicious events since then involving Black churches) makes it at least somewhat apparent to me that it would be a mistake to regard the South as a monolithic entity and, as such, to make conclusive statements with regard to how the South has changed, both since the 1960s and, for that matter, since the 1860s. Going further, to the extent that we recognize the demographic complexities implicated in any analysis of the South, we need to further recognize that, more than with any other region of the U.S., the history of the South and of Southerners, both White and Black, has been profoundly shaped by the Civil War and by the particular interpretations that Southern students of the conflict have brought to the table in an attempt to situate it in reference to the myriad processes leading to its initiation.
With this in mind and the peculiar (but, possibly, mistaken) notion that "the victors write the history books," it appears to me that the question of who actually won the American Civil War remains subject to debate. In a larger sense, notwithstanding the fact that the guns have lain silent since 1865, it might be conceivable to ask whether the Civil War actually ended, or whether it has simply continued in other forms, along diffuse, non-geographically-defined fronts with divergent, punctuated moments in which the same issues come back to the fore, engaging renewed and continuously evolving arrays of combattants over states' rights, the expansiveness of federal governmental power, race relations, and the broader meaning of the American experience as a collective historical legacy. These are questions for which I, emphatically, lack a definitive objective response. Rather, I hope soon to articulate a persuasive argument at length in order to say, most succinctly, that the particular ways in which we, as a nation (whatever that might imply!), have entered into debate on the meaning of this moment in our history have shaped the political, cultural, and economic development of the U.S. since the end of the Civil War and will continue to do so.
As Southern Republican politicians now stumble to get out of each others' ways in denouncing the legacy enshrouded in Confederate battle flags and reassuring the rest of the country that the South has decisively transformed itself since the days of Jim Crow segregation and the high tide of mainstream Ku Klux Klan White supremacy, the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist-Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (as well as other suspicious events since then involving Black churches) makes it at least somewhat apparent to me that it would be a mistake to regard the South as a monolithic entity and, as such, to make conclusive statements with regard to how the South has changed, both since the 1960s and, for that matter, since the 1860s. Going further, to the extent that we recognize the demographic complexities implicated in any analysis of the South, we need to further recognize that, more than with any other region of the U.S., the history of the South and of Southerners, both White and Black, has been profoundly shaped by the Civil War and by the particular interpretations that Southern students of the conflict have brought to the table in an attempt to situate it in reference to the myriad processes leading to its initiation.
With this in mind and the peculiar (but, possibly, mistaken) notion that "the victors write the history books," it appears to me that the question of who actually won the American Civil War remains subject to debate. In a larger sense, notwithstanding the fact that the guns have lain silent since 1865, it might be conceivable to ask whether the Civil War actually ended, or whether it has simply continued in other forms, along diffuse, non-geographically-defined fronts with divergent, punctuated moments in which the same issues come back to the fore, engaging renewed and continuously evolving arrays of combattants over states' rights, the expansiveness of federal governmental power, race relations, and the broader meaning of the American experience as a collective historical legacy. These are questions for which I, emphatically, lack a definitive objective response. Rather, I hope soon to articulate a persuasive argument at length in order to say, most succinctly, that the particular ways in which we, as a nation (whatever that might imply!), have entered into debate on the meaning of this moment in our history have shaped the political, cultural, and economic development of the U.S. since the end of the Civil War and will continue to do so.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Greek voters should vote "No" - It is time for Greece to leave the Eurozone
The Greek government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Syriza has scheduled a national referendum asking Greek voters to accept or reject a package of austerity measures, including tax increases and cuts in governmental expenditures, as a condition for continued financial assistance from the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Apparently, Tsipras is attempting to utilize the referendum as a bargaining chip in negotiations with European creditors in order to demonstrate the unanimity of the Greek electorate behind a more moderate, self-constructed set of institutional reforms and expansion of fiscal revenue sources (e.g. increases in corporate income tax rates and value-added taxes) less onerous to the broader Greek economy. It is difficult to discern whether Tsipras is proceeding in a disingenuous manner - clearly, Syriza's electorate voted Tsipras into office with a mandate to take a hard line against the Troika and prevent the imposition of further austerity measures on the Greek economy. To the extent that it is always preferable for political leaders to seek democratic approval for major national fiscal policy initiatives of this nature, I approve of the idea of holding a referendum to solicit the approval of the Greek electorate for a new austerity package. On the other hand, I am sure that Tsipras is counting on a "no" vote next sunday, because approval would constitute an implicit no confidence vote by the Greek electorate against Syriza and Tsipras.
With this in mind, I think it is time for the Greek electorate to conclude, resoundingly, that Greek membership in a single European currency zone was a bad idea and that long term Greek economic development stands to benefit from departure and reestablishment of its own national currency or (preferably) consolidation with other regional economies into a currency zone with more thoroughly harmonized interregional macroeconomic fundamentals. Such a move would recognize that the dream of the Euro is, itself, the major stumbling block to economic growth and development in the European periphery and that the only European state that ever stood, unambiguously, to gain from a single currency was Germany*. Moreover, while the notion that European political unity is cemented by the presence of the Euro enjoys some degree of validity, such a view neglects the role of continent-wide free trade and conscious national-level political commitment to the project of European unity, the sort of commitment that has been threatened thanks to the adverse effects of monetary consolidation. It is time for the Greeks to stand up for their own economic sovereignty and for all Europeans to realize common ground on the idea that they have more to lose from the economic contortions demanded by continued monetary union.
*Addendum: In the interest of being a little more fair to the Germans, the Euro is only an "unambiguous" benefit to the German economy from the standpoint of export industry, and exports maintain a privileged source of economic growth for Germany. The transition from the old German Mark had to generate a relative devaluation, hurting businesses and consumers reliant on import commodities. Likewise, since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, Germany, as the principal beneficiary of the transition to a single European currency and the strongest national economy in the Eurozone, bore a disproportionate share of the burden in providing financial support to Greece and other ailing peripheral national economies. Being number one has its costs. That said, Germany will suffer the most from a breakup of the Eurozone when the smoke finally clears from the departure of the peripheral economies. Assuming that a Euro without Greece will experience some degree of monetary appreciation relative to the U.S. dollar and other currencies, it's only a matter of time before Spain, Portugal, and perhaps even Italy start feeling the pain of having a currency poorly suited to their position within Europe and vis-à-vis non-European trading partners. In an interdependent world, increasingly embracing the logic of free trade, maintenance of a structurally lop-sided currency zone, to the detriment of weaker member economies, as a suture for political unity across Europe, is non-sensical.
With this in mind, I think it is time for the Greek electorate to conclude, resoundingly, that Greek membership in a single European currency zone was a bad idea and that long term Greek economic development stands to benefit from departure and reestablishment of its own national currency or (preferably) consolidation with other regional economies into a currency zone with more thoroughly harmonized interregional macroeconomic fundamentals. Such a move would recognize that the dream of the Euro is, itself, the major stumbling block to economic growth and development in the European periphery and that the only European state that ever stood, unambiguously, to gain from a single currency was Germany*. Moreover, while the notion that European political unity is cemented by the presence of the Euro enjoys some degree of validity, such a view neglects the role of continent-wide free trade and conscious national-level political commitment to the project of European unity, the sort of commitment that has been threatened thanks to the adverse effects of monetary consolidation. It is time for the Greeks to stand up for their own economic sovereignty and for all Europeans to realize common ground on the idea that they have more to lose from the economic contortions demanded by continued monetary union.
*Addendum: In the interest of being a little more fair to the Germans, the Euro is only an "unambiguous" benefit to the German economy from the standpoint of export industry, and exports maintain a privileged source of economic growth for Germany. The transition from the old German Mark had to generate a relative devaluation, hurting businesses and consumers reliant on import commodities. Likewise, since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, Germany, as the principal beneficiary of the transition to a single European currency and the strongest national economy in the Eurozone, bore a disproportionate share of the burden in providing financial support to Greece and other ailing peripheral national economies. Being number one has its costs. That said, Germany will suffer the most from a breakup of the Eurozone when the smoke finally clears from the departure of the peripheral economies. Assuming that a Euro without Greece will experience some degree of monetary appreciation relative to the U.S. dollar and other currencies, it's only a matter of time before Spain, Portugal, and perhaps even Italy start feeling the pain of having a currency poorly suited to their position within Europe and vis-à-vis non-European trading partners. In an interdependent world, increasingly embracing the logic of free trade, maintenance of a structurally lop-sided currency zone, to the detriment of weaker member economies, as a suture for political unity across Europe, is non-sensical.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Hopeful that Ireland will Pursue the Democratic Path to Marriage Equality
On Friday, Irish voters will go to the polls to decide (I presume among other things) whether to extend the liberty to enter in civil marriage to same-sex couples. (See "Gay marriage vote marks a quiet revolution in Ireland," Reuters (19 May 2015), at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/19/ireland-gaymarriage-history-idUSL5N0Y93MD20150519). If it succeeds in doing so, it will be the first country to enact same-sex marriage liberties by democratic referendum. In this regard, I am hopeful that Irish voters will approve this referendum by a two-to-one margin, as currently predicted. Likewise, I think there is a clear lesson here about how to pursue a humanistic, progressive agenda, with respect to the removal of sectarian moralistic prohibitions on sexuality and relationships, in full conformity with maintenance of the sovereign right of citizens to determine issues of such relevance in self-government as the definition of marriage. That is to say, I continue to wish that we had gone about the extension of marriage by democratic means in the U.S. rather than pursuing these ends by means of adjudication and juridical fiat.
Having said this, this change in Ireland's direction with regard to officially sanctioned morality seems to portend important consequences for the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. If two to three decades ago the Irish government operated in full conformity with a wide range of Catholic moral teaching, then today, as a result of certain internal matters and criminal abuses by Catholic ecclesiastical officials, the Church has largely alienated a broad spectrum of the Irish polity. To some degree, such developments are a good thing, to the extent that a weakening of the Catholic Church catapults Irish social policies into the Twenty-first century. On the other hand, I have to confess a degree of ignorance on the particular inbeddedness of the Church within the particular institutions of everyday life in Ireland. My own impressions are shaped, on the one hand, by the lingering influence of the Catholic Church as a major administrator of charitable donations supporting numerous humanitarian social agendas in Massachusetts, and, on the other hand, by my understanding of the historical collapse of Roman Catholic dominance in the adminstration of social policy in Québec, a pattern starting with the election of the Liberal Lesage government in the 1950s. At present, Catholicism remains significantly in a state of retreat in Québec. In Western Massachusetts, the onset of the clergy sexual abuse scandals in the 1990s, coupled with a fiscal restructuring of the dioceses of Massachusetts, with the closure or merger of a vast array of old, ethnically-demarcated parish communities, seems to portend a major retraction of the influence of Roman Catholicism and, perhaps, a major decline in the number of Massachusetts residents who identify themselves as Catholics. Insofar as I enjoy a jaded history with Roman Catholicism, I would express a certain degree of sadness that the Church is having such a difficult time accomodating itself to the changing attitudes of the faithful in so many areas where it had held out for so long against the forces of modernity/modernism. In these terms, the sort of decline in the influence of Catholicism in Ireland indicated by the impending success of marriage equality may hold broader negative social implications for Ireland that the larger polity will have to address (i.e. assuming that the Church is still broadly invested in a range of social/charitable undertaking, serving diverse needs). Conversely, it is suggestive of the necessity of larger, humanistic changes in moral teachings by the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, the sorts of changes that might be starting under the leadership of Francis I. We can all be hopeful!
Having said this, this change in Ireland's direction with regard to officially sanctioned morality seems to portend important consequences for the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. If two to three decades ago the Irish government operated in full conformity with a wide range of Catholic moral teaching, then today, as a result of certain internal matters and criminal abuses by Catholic ecclesiastical officials, the Church has largely alienated a broad spectrum of the Irish polity. To some degree, such developments are a good thing, to the extent that a weakening of the Catholic Church catapults Irish social policies into the Twenty-first century. On the other hand, I have to confess a degree of ignorance on the particular inbeddedness of the Church within the particular institutions of everyday life in Ireland. My own impressions are shaped, on the one hand, by the lingering influence of the Catholic Church as a major administrator of charitable donations supporting numerous humanitarian social agendas in Massachusetts, and, on the other hand, by my understanding of the historical collapse of Roman Catholic dominance in the adminstration of social policy in Québec, a pattern starting with the election of the Liberal Lesage government in the 1950s. At present, Catholicism remains significantly in a state of retreat in Québec. In Western Massachusetts, the onset of the clergy sexual abuse scandals in the 1990s, coupled with a fiscal restructuring of the dioceses of Massachusetts, with the closure or merger of a vast array of old, ethnically-demarcated parish communities, seems to portend a major retraction of the influence of Roman Catholicism and, perhaps, a major decline in the number of Massachusetts residents who identify themselves as Catholics. Insofar as I enjoy a jaded history with Roman Catholicism, I would express a certain degree of sadness that the Church is having such a difficult time accomodating itself to the changing attitudes of the faithful in so many areas where it had held out for so long against the forces of modernity/modernism. In these terms, the sort of decline in the influence of Catholicism in Ireland indicated by the impending success of marriage equality may hold broader negative social implications for Ireland that the larger polity will have to address (i.e. assuming that the Church is still broadly invested in a range of social/charitable undertaking, serving diverse needs). Conversely, it is suggestive of the necessity of larger, humanistic changes in moral teachings by the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, the sorts of changes that might be starting under the leadership of Francis I. We can all be hopeful!
Why it was a mistake to sentence Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Death
I just wanted to convey a few quick reflections on the sentencing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the remaining convicted Boston Marathon bomber, to death. Firstly, the Boston Marathon bombing remains a tragedy for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, one which we will remember for some time to come and which we still may be justified in continuing to ask why we should have been targeted for the retribution of crimes against Muslims by two Chechen brothers to whom we extended welcome arms as migrants looking for a place of peace from a homeland wrongly and savagely scarred by war. In its generalities, the Boston Marathon bombing was a crime against all Americans and, by virtue of the federal criminal code regarding the use of particular forms of ordnance to inflict mass casualties, a federal jurisdictional question rightly subject to adjudication within federal courts by federal prosecutors. In its particularities, however, it remains a crime against the people of Boston and, in this manner, under the General Laws of Massachusetts, a criminal offense against the citizens of this Commonwealth, a factor that continues to stand out in my mind.
In regard to both phases of the federal trial against Tsarnaev, I cannot fault either federal prosecutors or Tsarnaev's defense attorneys for execution of their duties. In view of witness testimony, video-taped evidence, and the extended drama of the manhunt against Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlin, there was little hope that Tsarnaev was going to be acquitted of utilizing homemade bombs to kill and wound multiple individuals at the finish line of the Marathon in 2013 and murdering an MIT campus police officer while attempting to allude apprehension by Boston area and state police. The defense conceded as much and waited for the penalty phase to make its case in favor of life imprisonment. In the penalty phase, prosecutors effectively made the case that Tsarnaev both lacked remorse for his actions and that he had, in fact, been thoroughly radicalized as a militant Salafist fighting to avenge the bloodshed of tens of thousands of Muslims at the hands of the U.S. military, its surrogates, and U.S. allies. As well conceived as the defense's planned case against the death penalty had been, anchored on the notion that Tsarnaev's brother Tamerlin had been both the mastermind of the bombing and the overarching influence over the actions of Dzhokhar for whom a thorough indoctrination in militant Salafism had not occurred, the image of Tsarnaev placing his bomb in close vicinity of Martin Richard, a nine-year old torn apart by the bomb in front of his parents, was probably adequate to convince members of the jury that Tsarnaev's inhumanity was a sufficient rationale to inflict the death penalty.
This post seeks to offer a short list of reasons why I think this decision was a mistake. For the sake of brevity, I will not elaborate on these at the present time, although I may do so in the future.
1. As a practical matter, given mandatory appellate review of Tsarnaev's sentence, the administration of justice against Tsarnaev will be delayed, perhaps by as many of fifteen years or more.
2. The appellate review process will both compel victims of the Marathon to relive the experiences of their personal tragedies and offer to Tsarnaev the opportunity to voice the radical Salafist views, that federal prosecutors have attributed to him, before a global audience. (Oddly, one would have supposed that these views might have been voiced in the course of his trial if Tsarnaev had really been a true believer!)
3. In the many years until he is executed, Tsarnaev will enjoy all of the privileges of a prisoners in the federal system that prosecutors insisted he should be denied with a penalty of death - he will enjoy at least a few hours of television a week, he will enjoy periodic visiting privileges with family, he will be able to keep in contact with family and friends by other means, he will enjoy other entertainment or educational privileges open to federal prisoners under maximum security whether on or off of death row.
4. Fiscally, the costs of the appellate review process, including fees for attorneys and investigators and the temporal expense of undertaking hearings and review of evidence by jurists in lieu of other case work in federal dockets, will easily outweigh the expenses of keeping Tsarnaev alive in a solitary, individual cell at the federal super-maximum security facility at Florence, Colorado until his time of death from natural causes.
5. Even before his eventual execution by federal authorities, Tsarnaev may become a rallying-cry for Salafists around the world. In particular, for Chechens and Dagestanis, both back home in the Russian Federation and within immigrant communities inside the U.S. and in other Western states, the impending execution of a countryman and brother in the faith may be adequate to radicalize many individuals unsatisfied by their evident conditions of life and seeking to discover an enemy (other than Putin, United Russia, and millions of Russian Orthodox nationalist-imperialists who have done everything in their power to declare Muslims in the North Caucasus their enemies) on whom to blame their circumstances. When Tsarnaev finally dies in the hands of American executioners, we will give millions of Salafists in many countries yet another martyr. Emphatically, we need to be more perceptive on the enemies we continue to make!
6. Following a line from an entirely valid argument by Tsarnaev's defense attorneys in the penalty phase, the prospective conditions of a life sentence without parole within the federal super-maximum facility at Florence, Colorado, spent under conditions approximating permanent solitary confinement described by numerous critics of federal criminal justice policies as psychological torture, might have constituted a more harsh sentence for Tsarnaev than the one that he will eventually, after many years of appeals, receive at the hands of federal executioners. Once Tsarnaev has exhausted his appeals, his suffering within the various boundaries of the federal criminal justice system will be over - had he been sentenced to life without parole, he could have been thrown into a small cell, in virtual solitary confinement, for the rest of his long, prospective natural life, utterly forgotten and foresaken by the world.
7. The crimes committed by Tsarnaev were, in their particularities, crimes committed against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - he is alleged to have committed multiple acts of murder in Massachusetts, crimes against the laws of Massachusetts for which he has yet to be tried. A preemptive determination of guilt for violation of federal laws by Tsarnaev should not exonerate Tsarnaev for facing justice before the Commonwealth within our system of criminal justice for the crimes he may have committed against the citizens of our Commonwealth. However, by virtue of the federal criminal justice process and, in particular, Tsarnaev's death sentence within the federal system, the Commonwealth may be denied its ability, if not to determine Tsarnaev's guilt, then to subsequently exact justice from Tsarnaev.
8. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in the federal criminal justice system at a courthouse in Massachusetts and with jurors who were citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a state in which capital punishment does not exist as a punishment within our criminal justice system. An innate contradiction exists in the willingness of our citizens to sanction punishments in the federal criminal justice system, on our soil, that apparently controvert our values concerning the dignity of human life and the purposes of the criminal justice process - it may be impossible to rehabilitate Tsarnaev, but the conversion of the criminal justice process from a means to manage and/or isolate individuals liable to damage peace and good order to a means for enacting public revenge for the commission of particular acts is inconsistent with the philosophy embodied in the criminal justice process of Massachusetts.
9. The trial and sentencing to death of individuals at federal courts in Massachusetts raises Constitutional questions with regard to the jurisdiction of the federal criminal justice system, the authority of Congress to specifically prohibit and assign criminal penalties for certain acts damaging to the U.S. Constitution, the federal government, and the security of the U.S., and the authority of the state government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to prosecute offenses to our criminal statutes, consistent with our sovereign authority to maintain peace, good order, and justice within our boundaries. In these terms, the sentencing of Tsarnaev to death in Massachusetts demands that citizens of this Commonwealth need to debate certain fundamental questions concerning criminal justice in Massachusetts. Namely, what should the criminal justice process seek to accomplish, especially in cases involving physical violence? Consistent with our theories regarding the ultimate purposes for criminal justice, should we re-authorize capital punishment in certain cases? How should the Commonwealth and its citizens confront the federal criminal justice process in a manner consistent with the embodied federalism of the U.S. Constitution? Is it reasonable, under the U.S. Constitution's Article I powers, for Congress to enact laws and authorize penalties contravening those permitted within individual states for particular circumstances like the use of "weapons of mass destruction?" (I do not presume to have the answer to any of these questions, but I think that we are not sufficiently exercising our capacities as U.S. citizens and citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to ask them.)
In regard to both phases of the federal trial against Tsarnaev, I cannot fault either federal prosecutors or Tsarnaev's defense attorneys for execution of their duties. In view of witness testimony, video-taped evidence, and the extended drama of the manhunt against Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlin, there was little hope that Tsarnaev was going to be acquitted of utilizing homemade bombs to kill and wound multiple individuals at the finish line of the Marathon in 2013 and murdering an MIT campus police officer while attempting to allude apprehension by Boston area and state police. The defense conceded as much and waited for the penalty phase to make its case in favor of life imprisonment. In the penalty phase, prosecutors effectively made the case that Tsarnaev both lacked remorse for his actions and that he had, in fact, been thoroughly radicalized as a militant Salafist fighting to avenge the bloodshed of tens of thousands of Muslims at the hands of the U.S. military, its surrogates, and U.S. allies. As well conceived as the defense's planned case against the death penalty had been, anchored on the notion that Tsarnaev's brother Tamerlin had been both the mastermind of the bombing and the overarching influence over the actions of Dzhokhar for whom a thorough indoctrination in militant Salafism had not occurred, the image of Tsarnaev placing his bomb in close vicinity of Martin Richard, a nine-year old torn apart by the bomb in front of his parents, was probably adequate to convince members of the jury that Tsarnaev's inhumanity was a sufficient rationale to inflict the death penalty.
This post seeks to offer a short list of reasons why I think this decision was a mistake. For the sake of brevity, I will not elaborate on these at the present time, although I may do so in the future.
1. As a practical matter, given mandatory appellate review of Tsarnaev's sentence, the administration of justice against Tsarnaev will be delayed, perhaps by as many of fifteen years or more.
2. The appellate review process will both compel victims of the Marathon to relive the experiences of their personal tragedies and offer to Tsarnaev the opportunity to voice the radical Salafist views, that federal prosecutors have attributed to him, before a global audience. (Oddly, one would have supposed that these views might have been voiced in the course of his trial if Tsarnaev had really been a true believer!)
3. In the many years until he is executed, Tsarnaev will enjoy all of the privileges of a prisoners in the federal system that prosecutors insisted he should be denied with a penalty of death - he will enjoy at least a few hours of television a week, he will enjoy periodic visiting privileges with family, he will be able to keep in contact with family and friends by other means, he will enjoy other entertainment or educational privileges open to federal prisoners under maximum security whether on or off of death row.
4. Fiscally, the costs of the appellate review process, including fees for attorneys and investigators and the temporal expense of undertaking hearings and review of evidence by jurists in lieu of other case work in federal dockets, will easily outweigh the expenses of keeping Tsarnaev alive in a solitary, individual cell at the federal super-maximum security facility at Florence, Colorado until his time of death from natural causes.
5. Even before his eventual execution by federal authorities, Tsarnaev may become a rallying-cry for Salafists around the world. In particular, for Chechens and Dagestanis, both back home in the Russian Federation and within immigrant communities inside the U.S. and in other Western states, the impending execution of a countryman and brother in the faith may be adequate to radicalize many individuals unsatisfied by their evident conditions of life and seeking to discover an enemy (other than Putin, United Russia, and millions of Russian Orthodox nationalist-imperialists who have done everything in their power to declare Muslims in the North Caucasus their enemies) on whom to blame their circumstances. When Tsarnaev finally dies in the hands of American executioners, we will give millions of Salafists in many countries yet another martyr. Emphatically, we need to be more perceptive on the enemies we continue to make!
6. Following a line from an entirely valid argument by Tsarnaev's defense attorneys in the penalty phase, the prospective conditions of a life sentence without parole within the federal super-maximum facility at Florence, Colorado, spent under conditions approximating permanent solitary confinement described by numerous critics of federal criminal justice policies as psychological torture, might have constituted a more harsh sentence for Tsarnaev than the one that he will eventually, after many years of appeals, receive at the hands of federal executioners. Once Tsarnaev has exhausted his appeals, his suffering within the various boundaries of the federal criminal justice system will be over - had he been sentenced to life without parole, he could have been thrown into a small cell, in virtual solitary confinement, for the rest of his long, prospective natural life, utterly forgotten and foresaken by the world.
7. The crimes committed by Tsarnaev were, in their particularities, crimes committed against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - he is alleged to have committed multiple acts of murder in Massachusetts, crimes against the laws of Massachusetts for which he has yet to be tried. A preemptive determination of guilt for violation of federal laws by Tsarnaev should not exonerate Tsarnaev for facing justice before the Commonwealth within our system of criminal justice for the crimes he may have committed against the citizens of our Commonwealth. However, by virtue of the federal criminal justice process and, in particular, Tsarnaev's death sentence within the federal system, the Commonwealth may be denied its ability, if not to determine Tsarnaev's guilt, then to subsequently exact justice from Tsarnaev.
8. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in the federal criminal justice system at a courthouse in Massachusetts and with jurors who were citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a state in which capital punishment does not exist as a punishment within our criminal justice system. An innate contradiction exists in the willingness of our citizens to sanction punishments in the federal criminal justice system, on our soil, that apparently controvert our values concerning the dignity of human life and the purposes of the criminal justice process - it may be impossible to rehabilitate Tsarnaev, but the conversion of the criminal justice process from a means to manage and/or isolate individuals liable to damage peace and good order to a means for enacting public revenge for the commission of particular acts is inconsistent with the philosophy embodied in the criminal justice process of Massachusetts.
9. The trial and sentencing to death of individuals at federal courts in Massachusetts raises Constitutional questions with regard to the jurisdiction of the federal criminal justice system, the authority of Congress to specifically prohibit and assign criminal penalties for certain acts damaging to the U.S. Constitution, the federal government, and the security of the U.S., and the authority of the state government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to prosecute offenses to our criminal statutes, consistent with our sovereign authority to maintain peace, good order, and justice within our boundaries. In these terms, the sentencing of Tsarnaev to death in Massachusetts demands that citizens of this Commonwealth need to debate certain fundamental questions concerning criminal justice in Massachusetts. Namely, what should the criminal justice process seek to accomplish, especially in cases involving physical violence? Consistent with our theories regarding the ultimate purposes for criminal justice, should we re-authorize capital punishment in certain cases? How should the Commonwealth and its citizens confront the federal criminal justice process in a manner consistent with the embodied federalism of the U.S. Constitution? Is it reasonable, under the U.S. Constitution's Article I powers, for Congress to enact laws and authorize penalties contravening those permitted within individual states for particular circumstances like the use of "weapons of mass destruction?" (I do not presume to have the answer to any of these questions, but I think that we are not sufficiently exercising our capacities as U.S. citizens and citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to ask them.)
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