Zacstravaganza!

Does John Hinckley Still Pose a Threat to Society?

2012-02-01T20:53:00.000-08:00

(Originally published by the WCL Criminal Law Brief Blog)

In January 2012, Judge Paul Friedman presided over hearings to determine whether to grant John Hinckley extended furloughs from St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital, where he has been committed for the past thirty years. Hinckley’s lawyers petitioned Judge Friedman to grant two seventeen-day furloughs, and then six furloughs of twenty-four days to his mother’s home in Williamsburg, Virginia, with convalescence leave upon the completion thereof. Federal prosecutors challenged the petition, arguing that Hinckley remains a threat to society and that his furlough privileges should not be expanded.

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan and three others at the Washington Hilton in a failed assassination attempt. The United States indicted Hinckley on 13 counts, including attempted assassination of the President of the United States, attempted murder, multiple counts of assault, and various weapons charges. In 1982, John Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and involuntarily committed to St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital.

Hinckley has suffered from severe schizophrenia and depression, and has long been obsessed with the delusion that he entertained an unrequited romantic communication with the actress Jodie Foster. Hinckley wrote a letter to her a few hours before leaving for the Hilton Hotel, “[b]y sacrificing my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me . . . Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance, with this historical deed, to gain your respect and love.”

Upon admittance to St. Elizabeth’s, John Hinckley underwent psychiatric evaluation and was classified as a danger to himself, Jodie Foster, and any third party whom he believed to stand in the way between himself and his ultimate aims. While confined as a patient, Hinckley has remained tormented by schizophrenia and severe bouts of depression. He attempted to commit suicide at least three times. A 1987 search of Hinckley’s room found writings that revealed that he remained obsessed with Jodie Foster, exchanged correspondence with the serial killer Ted Bundy, and attempted to reach out to the murderous cult leader Charles Manson.

After years of intensive therapy, the psychologists and psychiatrists of St. Elizabeth’s have maintained that Hinckley’s mental illness has been in remission. In 1999, a federal court allowed Hinckley to enjoy supervised furloughs to the house of his aging mother in Williamsburg, Virginia. According to the court order he is required to carry a GPS-equipped cell phone at all times. He has been allowed to visit restaurants, bookstores, and shopping malls without incident.

In 2009, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman considered a petition from Hinckley’s lawyers to extend his furlough privileges to periods of ten days at a time. Judge Friedman wrote in his ruling, “[t]he ultimate question is whether a preponderance of the evidence supports the proposition that Mr. Hinckley will not, in the reasonable future, be a danger to himself or others.” A forensic psychologist testified that “Hinckley has recovered to the point that he poses no imminent risk of danger to himself or others.” Judge Friedman agreed, and extended Hinckley’s furlough privileges to periods of ten days.

Whether Judge Friedman grants the defense counsel’s petition for extended furlough and convalescence leave will turn on whether the court determines that Hinckley, after 30 years of psychiatric treatment and counseling at St. Elizabeth’s, has been sufficiently rehabilitated.

Schizophrenia is a chronic condition which may remit and exacerbate periodically. Persons who suffer from schizophrenia can often mitigate their symptoms with therapy and anti-psychotic medications. However, if a patient suffering from schizophrenia were to be discharged from an institution, neglect to go to follow-up outpatient visits, and refuse to take his medication as prescribed, one could within days to weeks and most probably within a month remit into flagrant psychosis. In many cases, those who present with symptoms of paranoia often fear taking their prescribed medication, believing that it is poison. Many patients stop taking their medications because of the undesirable side-effects.

For more than 12 years, Hinckley’s psychologists and psychiatrists have maintained that his mental illness has remitted to the point that he is no longer an imminent danger to himself or the rest of society. However, there remains the thorny fact that John Hinckley shot the President – the most popular President of the modern era and a Republican icon.

The United States maintains that there should be no changes to the conditions of Hinckley’s involuntary confinement. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Chasson argued before the court at the 2011 hearings that Hinckley has acted deceptively and dishonestly with the St. Elizabeth’s staff during his conditional releases. According to Chasson, Hinckley told the staff that he was going to see a movie, but Secret Service agents observed Hinckley walk to the ticket counter but slip into the nearby Barnes & Nobles. According to the government’s account, Hinckley dwelled in the history aisles and stood fixated on books about Reagan and presidential assassinations.

The prosecutors also noted in their court filing, “Hinckley continues to be deceptive regarding his relationships with and interest in women. In June 2009, Hinckley searched the Internet for photographs of his female dentist. When he was caught, Hinckley claimed, falsely, that the dentist had invited him to view her personal photographs.”

Clearly, John Hinckley remains a troubled man, and one could construe Hinckley’s reported behavior to establish that his pathology remains unvanquished. Cyber-stalking one’s dentist might be deemed by the court of society to be categorically inappropriate. In the context of a man who has resorted to outrageous feats of violence to win the admiration of women, is it evidence of an unreformed aspiring assassin with the intent to kill again?

A parole officer should be concerned that a potential parolee said that he was going to the movies but went to the Barnes & Nobles instead. Telling a parole officer one thing but doing another, no matter how trivial, is a violation of the terms of a furlough. But is it not eminently reasonable for Hinckley to be interested in biographies of the man he tried to kill and scholarly accounts of his walk-on role in American history?

“The risk of danger is decidedly low,” maintains Barry Levine, counsel for Mr. Hinckley, “We must look at the legal standing between mental illness and danger.” Levine told Judge Friedman that “The evidence shows this man is not dangerous.”

However, U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, who prosecuted the case in 1982, opines, “I think John Hinckley will be a threat the rest of his life. He is a time bomb.”

The Racial Geography of American Justice/Injustice

2012-01-20T17:52:00.000-08:00

Free States and Slave States, 1854

Segregation, 1950
(National Park Service)

Incarceration Rate, 2011

Death Penalty by Statute and Executions, 1976-2011

Res Ipsa Loquitor.

NDAA Sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran: Watering the Grassroots of Regime Change

2012-01-15T12:52:00.000-08:00

Iran fired long-range cruise missiles into the Strait of Hormuz - the waterway through which 20 percent of world’s traded petroleum must pass to get to market. The U.S. Navy deployed a carrier group through the Strait as a show of force. The mullahs responded, stating that the deployment of warships through the Strait might provoke full-out naval warfare. The U.S. retorted that the Strait will be kept open to shipping by all means necessary. The world economy, already suffering from a minor depression, anxiously fears a disruption in Persian Gulf petroleum supplies, a spike in oil prices, and the spiraling inflation which might kick the crutches out from under the fragile recovery.

This brinksmanship did not originate out of the mullahs’ sudden desire to hold the world hostage, but rather as a direct and foreseeable response to the latest round of economic sanctions enacted by the United States of America against the Islamic Republic of Iran. This policy is not a new one; the U.S. already maintains a practically absolute program of trade sanctions against the entire Iranian economy. Executive Order 12959 issued by President Clinton prohibited all trade with Iran; the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act imposed severe penalties on any U.S. corporation that invests in Iran’s petroleum sector; Iranian banks are completely barred from transacting with U.S. financial institutions. Now, through the Kirk Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, the U.S. has levied third party sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). As of December 31st, this measure gave foreign companies a stark choice: one can either conduct business with the CBI or conduct business with the United States.

Foreign corporations have opted to do business with the United States and divest from the Central Bank of Iran. The effect of this mass pullout from the CBI has been a sharp drop in the strength of Iran’s currency. Since the Kirk Amendment went into effect, the rial has weakened by 20 percent compared to other currencies. Iranians are rushing to currency exchanges to trade their holdings in the rial for euros, dollars, any currency that might be more stable. Prices in Iranian bazaars are fluctuating so quickly that vendors of imported cell phones and computers are changing their prices by the hour. Commercial establishments dependent upon imports and exports are going out of business because no one wants to transact with a company with unpredictable prices. Iranian manufacturers have shuttered their factory doorsbecause they cannot afford to do business so long as the rial is subject to such erratic fluctuations.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently told the Majlis that the latest measures were “the most extensive . . . sanctions ever.” He continued, “this is the heaviest economic onslaught on a nation in history.”

The depreciation of the rial compared to foreign currencies has led to a painful spike of food prices in this nation highly dependent upon imported food. The price of food staples such as rice, bread, chicken, and lamb have risen by roughly 40 percent in Iranian bazaars. Iranian households have suddenly found themselves unable to put food on the table. Those who can have seen the quality of their food decline. Medications and pharmaceuticals are more expensive too. Though it is too early to tally much data, it appears likely that the Iranian people will likely suffer an acute rise in malnutrition, increased susceptability to disease, and an overall decline in health over the long run.

The NDAA sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran are as provocative as a full-on blockade. Congress has intentionally engineered a direct hit on the Iranian civilian economy. It’s no wonder why Ahmadinejad has resorted to saber-rattling in the Strait of Hormuz – the United States has all but declared economic war on Iran.

So why would the United States of America, send such a belligerent shot across the bow of a country that has not attacked us? Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), one of the GOP’s rising hawks on Middle Eastern affairs, explains the rationale for his eponymous Amendment:

"When we look at Iran today, we see an accelerating nuclear program, expanding ballistic missile program and a wholesale disregard for human rights . . . These are not the signs of successful U.S. sanctions against the regime. Iran continues to sponsor terror around the world, including most recently a failed attack on U.S. soil. In response, the Administration should move quickly to implement the most effective, non-military response - cutting off the Central Bank of Iran and collapsing the Iranian currency."

Let’s break that down. Senator Kirk’s stated rationale for the CBI third party sanctions is that Iran is:

1) pursuing nuclear capabilities;
2) sponsoring terrorism;
3) violating the human rights of its subjects.

Chew on that for a minute.

Let’s say that one of these days, say a year from now, the Iranian economy is so devastated and the people are conducting nation-wide strikes and mass demonstrations in the streets of Tehran ten times as massive as the unrest in 2009. The regime is on its knees. The Ayatollah Khameini completely disavows the Islamic Republic’s intention of pursuing nuclear technologies once and for all so that it can reallocate its resources towards food production. This fantasy is, in fact, the purported endgame of the CBI sanctions. In such a scenario, would the Obama (or Romney) administration declare the mission accomplished, that the Treasury Department is going to de-list the NDAA sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran?

Of course not – Senator Kirk’s original intent of the CBI sanctions was also to protest Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and human rights abuses. At that point, the Iran hawks would surely justify the crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s financial sponsorship of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Surely, Senator Kirk and his colleagues would argue, we must maintain the economic sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran until it forsakes these militant anti-Israel organizations. The Iran hawks would also point out Tehran’s purported direct organizing of terrorist acts – including the botched attempt to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States.

Let’s suppose the sanctions are really working, the Ayatollah Khameini has consulted with his finance ministers, and the mullahs decide that it is economically imperative to abandon their deadweight terrorist clients; Tehran de-friends Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Khameini declares in a globally-televised address that the Islamic Republic has disavowed its terrorist conduct once and for all. Would the State Department ever let Iran come in from the cold – like it did with Libya, Sudan and North Korea – and drop their designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism?

It appear unlikely that this could ever happen, because in 2007, at AIPAC’s request, the State Department labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps itself as a terrorist organization. Likewise, for Iran to ever shake its State Sponsor of Terrorism status, either the Revolutionary Guards would have to cease to be a terrorist organization, or the Iranian government would have to cease its financial and logistical support for its very own intelligence/paramilitary agency. This is as likely to happen, of course, as the U.S. is likely to cease our support for the CIA and the U.S. Army. The designation of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization was patently made to ensure that the Islamic Republic of Iran – so long as the regime exists in its present form - is never stripped of its designation as a terrorist state.

But let’s be optimistic, and suppose the economic conditions in Iran become so insufferable that the Islamic Republic not only abandons its nuclear ambitions, but throws Hamas & Co. under the bus, and disbands the Revolutionary Guards Corps. The only criterion to the Kirk Amendment left standing is the continuing criticism of its human rights violations. Suppose Tehran ends the random beatings, arrests and disappearances of peaceful demonstrators and dissidents. The Majlis vote to prohibit torture, abolish capital punishment, and end government censorship of the media. The Ayatollah even consents to a wholesale overhaul of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran so that it ensures equal rights for women, religious minorities, and homosexuals. Under such a pie-in-the sky fantasy scenario, wouldn’t the Obama (or Romney) administration be tempted to repeal the sanctions on the Central Bank?

Though it would be eminently reasonable to repeal the CBI sanctions if Iran substantially performs on each and every demand of the Kirk Amendment, it is difficult to imagine that any U.S. administration might ever back down on the sanctions program so long as Iran remains an Islamic Republic. Depending on how one construes the term human rights, an administration could justify continuing the CBI sanctions so long as Iran limits the participation of non-Islamic parties in its presidential and parliamentary elections. Even if the Guardian Council were to allow for truly democratic, multiparty elections, Iran hawks could always object to the fact that all real political power resides in the Supreme Leader who is the commander of the armed forces, who exercises great sway over all branches of government – and who is not elected by popular vote. One could argue that the Iranian people’s freedom of religion is violated unless the theocratic institutions of the Supreme Leader, the Assembly of Experts, and the Guardian Council are completely abolished.

An elected government composed of the Majlis and the Presidency might not suffice either. It appears that the 1979-81 hostage crisis left such a pall of humiliation on the American psyche that no administration, no Congress will ever be satisfied until the entire Iranian regime is eviscerated to a pulp and a completely new regime is erected from scratch. When U.S. officials talk about human rights in Iran, they often imply the right to be free of the Islamic Republic.

It appears that the real end goal of the CBI sanctions is an aim which most Iran hawks are reluctant to flat-out mention: to inflict hardship onto the Iranian civilian population so as to stir up discontent with the Iranian government. A January 10th article in The Washington Post by Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson quoted a senior U.S. intelligence official laying out the strategy:

The Obama administration sees economic sanctions against Iran as building public discontent that will help compel the government to abandon an alleged nuclear weapons program, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official.

In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, the official said, “another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.”

The intelligence official’s remarks pointed to what has long been an unstated reality of sanctions: Although designed to pressure a government to change its policies, they often impose broad hardships on a population. . . .

A senior administration official, speaking separately, acknowledged that public discontent was a likely result of more punitive sanctions against Iran’s already faltering economy, but said that is not the direct intent. . . .

“The question is whether people in the government feel pressure from the fact that there’s public discontent,” the official said, “versus whether the sanctions themselves are intended to collapse the regime.”

The original version of this January 10th Post article quoted the anonymous administration official as stating that the ultimate end goal of the sanctions was, in fact, to foment “regime collapse.” A later version of the same article was amended, sheepishly backpedaling that that statement was “incorrectly reported.” Either way, this off-the-record story was a veritable bombshell as it explicitly named the hardship and discontentment of the Iranian population as an express goal of the CBI sanctions.

But the question remains; was the first reporting of this article retracted because the invocation of “regime collapse” was a misquote? Or did this anonymous senior administration official simply say too much? Are we sabotaging the Iranian civilian economy because we want the people to write to their Representatives in the Majlis to vote “Nay” on a nuclear program bill? Would Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon be content with an Islamic Republic sans nuclear capabilities? Or are we going to maintain these draconian sanctions until the Islamic Republic lies in the same ash heap of history as the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahariya?

We have conducted regime change in Iran before, and Iran has enjoyed the blessings of democratic self-government – though not in that order. The brief reign of Iranian democracy lasted during the brief window from 1951 to 1953 under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh was as revered a nationalist leader in the Age of Decolonization could be. But after Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the Truman administration enacted an embargo on nationalized Iranian oil. President Eisenhower followed up by authorizing Kermit Roosevelt to lead the joint CIA/MI5 mission Operation Ajax. Roosevelt and his cohorts fomented political instability in Iran with bombings and demonstrations, destabilized the Mossadegh government and re-installed the Shah Reza Pahlavi by coup d’état. Embargo proved to be but a prelude to direct CIA subversion.

Neoconservatives like Senator Kirk are gaga over the Central Bank of Iran sanctions because they hope that these restrictions might achieve the same end of Operation Ajax by purely economic means. But this strategy inadvertently showcases the extent to which Neoconservativism borrows generously from more radical (and European!) ideologies. According to the Marxist-Leninist "immiseration thesis", the worse the economy, the more “immiserated” the proletariat, the more radicalized the proletariat becomes, and the greater chance of political revolution. Trotsky’s corollary to the Marxist-Leninist “immiseration thesis” was essentially that farsighted vanguards of humanity could speed up the process of political revolution by deliberately sabotaging the economy. Similarly, with the CBI sanctions the Neocons expressly aim to foment so much havoc in the Iranian economy that the Iranian people are thoroughly “immiserated" that they become radicalized, and bring about regime change on their own accord.

What happens if the sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran don’t succeed in dislodging the Islamic Republic? 13 years of comprehensive sanctions maintained by all of the United Nations against Iraq did nothing to remove Saddam Hussein. After 6 years of Israeli-American-European strangulation, Hamas still maintains its fiefdom in the Gaza Strip. After 52 years of unilateral U.S. embargo, the Castro brothers are still in power in Cuba. With the exception of perhaps South Africa and Chile, trade sanctions have rarely succeeded in fomenting regime change.

In the aforementioned cases, economic sanctions have certainly achieved the intending goal of “immiseration”; embargoes plunged the Cuban, Iraqi, and Palestinian populations into even more devastating poverty. But the undesired regimes did not budge. Though the incumbent regimes have been able to blame the people’s economic misery on America and the Western powers, and they have benefited from the “rally-around-the-flag” effect which often results from acts popularly characterized as foreign aggression. The manifestations of this effect can be transnational and quite sinister; in his seminal fatwa, Osama bin Laden justified his waging jihad against the American people partly upon the misery suffered by the Iraqi people under UN sanctions.

The NDAA’s latest salvo against the Iranian economy might not even disincentivize the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. According to the Post’s anonymous administration official, “[the CBI sanctions program] could have the opposite effect from what’s intended,” he said, “and impel the Iranian leader to decide, ‘We’re going to build that nuclear weapon.’ We’ve thought of that.”

Don’t get me wrong; the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the most despicable regimes in the world today. President Ahmadinejad, the Ayatollah Khameini, and all agents and bureaucrats complicit in the murder of peaceful demonstrators in 2009 ought to be indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity. Any fair observer must look forward to the day when the Iranian people inevitably rise up and overthrow the Ayatollah and the mullahs in favor of a new, more democratic form of government. However, it appears that “immiseration”-based trade sanctions might be neither suitable nor necessary to achieve this end.

Trade sanctions with the express purpose of inflicting economic pain upon a civilian population should not be blithely enacted without due regard for their moral price and their real human costs. Terrorism is generally defined as the deliberate use of violence aimed against civilians in order to achieve political ends. The Geneva Centre for Security Policy defines economic terrorism as “varied, coordinated and sophisticated, or massive destabilizing actions [undertaken by transnational or non-state actors] to disrupt the economic stability of a state, groups of states, or society.” Maybe the CBI sanctions program is not economic terrorism because it is conducted by state actors. Maybe it is isn't economic terrorism when we do it. Maybe the CBI sanctions program is economic terrorism - but if it leads to the downfall of the Islamic Republic, the ends justify the means. Maybe it depends on what the definition of is is.

One can be a steadfast critic of the Iranian government and also a critic of one's own country's attempts to thwart the Iranian government. There is a sizeable camp of critics who loathe the Iranian regime and who also believe that the less foreigners do to meddle in that country's internal politics, the better for the legitimacy of the Iranian reform movement. Some of us despise the Islamic Republic and cannot wait to see the day when the Iranian people are free from its tyranny, but we also believe that the Iranian people’s struggle for political freedom is theirs and theirs alone.

On Presidents, Palestinians, and the Jewish Vote

2012-01-05T18:33:00.001-08:00

This is an election year, so it should come as no surprise that presidential aspirants are busy pandering to every strategic voting bloc, including the large populations of Jewish voters in New York, New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Appealing to Jewish voters on the subject of Israel is nothing new – shtetl politicians have campaigned on this salient issue as long as there has been a Zionist movement. However, what is new in this election cycle is the unprecedented degree of gutter politics and general nastiness that the discourse on Israel has acquired.

At the Republican Jewish Coalition forum, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann thundered that Israel should cede “not one acre, not one square foot, not one inch” to the Palestinians in order to make peace.

Governor Rick Perry declared that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank are actually legal, “and I support them.”

Newt Gingrich claimed that the Palestinians are an “invented people” – with the implication that if the Palestinians are not a true nation then they cannot have a nation-state.

Rick Santorum went even further, claiming, “All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis. They are not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian. This is Israeli land.”

Putting these statements together, one sees a Republican foreign policy platform which does more than simply repudiate the “Land for Peace” premise of U.S.-led peace negotiations between Israel and her Arab neighbors – it repudiates the very notion of a peace process altogether. The GOP presidential aspirants wish to reverse the longstanding U.S. policy of opposition to the illegal Israeli settlements in West Bank territory and now actively endorse continued colonial expansion. The foreign policy which these candidates espouse is a radical abandonment of U.S. policy for the past 45 years – including the foreign policies of the Nixon, Reagan, and both Bush administrations – and a substitution of the religiously and racially exclusivist ideologies of Revisionist Zionism in its place.

Why would candidates for leader of the free world stoop to such lows? Karl Rove and the greater Republican National Committee believe that by making Israel into a wedge issue, GOP candidates can peel off some of the 78% of Jewish voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2008. GOP strategists believe that they might have found a winning strategy in pandering to the basest fears of the collective Jewish psyche: our instinctive paranoia of Arabs, Muslims, and anyone otherwise resembling Yasser Arafat. Such Palestinian-bashing is a reprehensible tactic which all advocates of tolerance and basic decency must condemn. Tragically, it might win Mitt Romney a few votes, it might even flip a few Hasidic communities to the GOP tent for good.

One should expect such below-the-belt jabs from the folks who brought you the “White Hands” ad and Willie Horton. But what is concerning is that the Democratic National Committee might take the bait and try to out-pander the panderers. One might hope that Democratic candidates will not join this race to the bottom in Palestinian-bashing because they are too good for that kind of gutter politics.

One might even hope that the enlightened Democrats might get the memo that the State of Israel is not the only matter of interest to each and every one America’s 6,544,000 Jews. It is insulting to think that a politician can buy our votes with a pledge for more reflexive embrace of everything the Netanyahu administration says and does in the same manner as, say, one stumps for votes among Iowan farmers by promising more subsidies for corn.

Zionism and diplomatic support for the State of Israel have always been an undercurrent in Jewish-American politics, but it was never the end-all-be-all until relatively recently. Not too long ago, candidates campaigned in Jewish neighborhoods in Park Slope and Brookline by stumping on the issues most relevant to a then-largely working class demographic; unionism, wages, and pensions, immigration reform, civil rights legislation. However, with the passing of generations, the bulk of us have moved from the ghettoes to the wealthy suburbs, and there is no longer a distinct economic pitch to appeal to both the seamstress in South Williamsburg who makes $22,000 a year and the bond trader in Greenwich who makes $2.2 million. Thus Jewish-American politics has been reduced to Israel: the one issue which (ostensibly) unites us all.

Nevertheless, in our day-to-day conversations, American Jews are more concerned about the job market, fairness in the tax code, the cost of health insurance, the quality of our environment. We are disproportionately in favor of taking measures to curb global warming, reforming our criminal justice system, and creating a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Why don’t candidates for public office come to our congregations and campaign on these issues which actually affect our lives, the lives of our friends and family members a whole lot more than a foreign country two continents and an ocean away? Of course, we will always have a special sense of sympathy for the Jewish State. But if we are going to speak about foreign policy, Israel is but one of 195 foreign countries (196 if you count Palestine) with which we are concerned.

If presidential candidates are going to speak to a Jewish audience on Israel and Israel alone, then they might as well appeal to our greatest hopes instead of our darkest fears. According to a 2011 J Street poll, the vast majority of American Jews want a U.S.-brokered solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (83%), and for the Obama administration to offer a peace plan that proposes set borders and security arrangements (70%). A healthy majority of American Jews even back a peace plan based on the 1967 borders with mutually agreed-upon land swaps (57%). If politicians are going to campaign for Jewish voters on Israel, they ought to pledge to sit down with Netanyahu and Abbas and hammer out a peace deal for once and for all.

Sure, 17 percent of American Jews are opposed to the Middle East peace process - just as 18 percent of American Jews are opposed to equal rights for gays and lesbians, 22 percent of American Jews thought that Sarah Palin should have been the Vice President, and there are even some of us who think there should be segregation on public transportation. But Democratic politicians have no obligation to kowtow to these forces of reaction, the very most closed-minded minority of my people - because they're Republicans. The DNC ought to accept this reality, move on, and campaign to the vast majority of Jewish voters who support a U.S.-brokered peace process.

Making peace in the Middle East is not a campaign liability which candidates ought to run away from – it is a badge of honor which Democratic Presidents ought to embrace. The legacy of Democratic administrations vis-à-vis Israel is not limited to Harry Truman’s recognition of the Jewish State in 1948. The greatest foreign policy achievements of Democratic administrations include Lyndon Johnson’s support for Resolution 242 in the United Nations, Jimmy Carter’s brokering of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, Bill Clinton’s facilitation of negotiations over the Israel-Jordan peace treaty and the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. The majority of Jewish voters want to see Barack Obama live up to this long legacy of Democratic achievement and oversee peace negotiations leading to a two-state solution in which the nations of Israel and Palestine are living side by side, in peace and security. That’s the kind of change we can believe in.

It's Time to End the Embargo on Cuba

2011-12-18T09:43:00.000-08:00

“I think it’s time for us to end the embargo on Cuba”, Barack Obama declared as he was running for the Senate in 2004, “The Cuban embargo has failed to provide for the sort of rising standard of living, has squeezed the innocents in Cuba, and utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro – who has now been there since I was born. So it’s time for us to acknowledge that that particular policy has failed.”

Since Obama recognized this matter-of-fact truth, the embargo on Cuba failed to overthrow the Castro regime for an additional 8 years, thusfar failing for a grand total of 52 years and achieving the dubious distinction of being the longest-running blockade in in the history of the world. It would be fair to say that the U.S. embargo on Cuba has been the worst trade policy ever made.

So why don’t we just call a spade a spade and finally open up trade with Cuba? Now more than ever, American businesses desperately need to access new markets and increase our exports to other countries. As the Obama administration has sold free trade agreements with Panama and Colombia as part of the Recovery Agenda, it’s time to repackage trade with Cuba as a means of expanding markets for American farmers and manufacturers and creating more American jobs.

Trade sanctions are more than just a means of making a statement; they are economic policies with real world ramifications for the markets of the United States, the targeted country, and third party markets as well. Trade sanctions must be subject to the same cost-benefit analysis as any other economic policy. If Congress were to ban the export of tear gas to Bahrain, that would have a targeted effect on the abilities of the Bahraini state to repress its own people and only a minimal effect on the U.S. economy. The benefits would far outweigh the costs.

However, if you compare such a nominal targeted sanction to our comprehensive embargo on Cuba which prohibits almost all economic activity with the island nation, this policy cannot withstand the scrutiny of any rational analysis. The costs of the United States' self-abnegation from the Cuban market disproportionately outweigh the benefits – that is, if there are any benefits at all.

In the 1960s when Castro was harboring Soviet nuclear weapons and threatening to foment Communist insurrection throughout the Americas, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations were arguably justified in restricting trade with Cuba. At a time when Pentagon hawks were advocating for a ground invasion to topple the regime and all-out war with the Soviet Union, economic blockade was a reasonable alternative to gambling with nuclear Armageddon.

But half a century later, the Cold War is over, the People’s Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam are among our most important trading partners, and the strategic value of containing Cuba is paltry-to-nonexistant. Uncle Fidel is 85, ailing, and has relinquished all official powers; his anti-American subversion now consists of writing the occasional editorial on his sporadically-updated blog. In the year 2012, Cuba is no more a threat to the national security of the United States than the left-wing Caribbean nations of Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, or Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

On the other hand, the costs of the embargo on Cuba to the U.S. economy are enormous. Cuba is a market of 11 million consumers and a GDP of $57 billion. The island nation needs to import $9 billion worth of mostly food, refined oil, farm machinery and chemicals every year. And because of the Helms-Burton Act which codified the embargo into law, this promising market only 90 miles from the Florida coast is all but completely off-limits to American businesses, taking $9 billion in potential U.S. exports, untold billions more output from the ancillary commerce which could result, and effectively flushing them down the toilet.

It is still fair for observers of objectively-discernible reality to decry the Republic of Cuba's contemptible human rights record. The government remains a dictatorship which muzzles opposing views, jails political prisoners and the like. There is a convincing human rights-based argument that we shouldn’t sell them tanks, helicopters, rifles and bullets that could be used in the act of political repression.

But now that Communism is an anachronistic novelty, is there any reason why we shouldn’t be able to freely sell the Cuban people American-made food, clothing, medicine, and toys? Is there any reason why the U.S. should single out Cuba’s lack of multiparty elections to maintain the most restrictive trade sanctions on the books? Even in our own hemisphere, why is Cuba more deserving of embargo than, say, human rights abusing Venezuela ($55 billion in trade in 2011), Colombia ($35.7 billion), or Bolivia($1.5 billion)?

The U.S. embargo of Cuba is so severe that it severely infringes upon the rights of American citizens. Section 515.204 of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations prohibits any person subject to U.S. jurisdiction from engaging in any transaction relating to any product which is of Cuban origin. Section 515.204 doesn’t prohibit the travel per se of U.S. citizens to Cuba, but it does make it a crime for U.S. citizens to so much as pay the bill at a Havana restaurant without an elusive license from the Treasury Department. Any U.S. citizen found guilty of making such a transaction can be fined up to $250,000 and/or imprisoned for up to 10 years.

The cold winter of the unilateral U.S. embargo is beginning to thaw. In January 2011 President Obama quietly issued an executive order easing the travel ban to Cuba – allowing the Treasury and State Departments to authorize “purposeful travel” by academic, religious, and cultural groups to the island. Obama’s executive order also allows for the transfer of funds to Cuban religious and civil society groups – but pointedly refrained from allowing the unrestricted flow of remittances from Cuban-Americans to their family members on the island.

Imagine the possibilities for the U.S. economy if President Obama were to go further and act on his campaign pledge to completely do away with the draconian ban on travel, if he were to use his executive power to eliminate Section 515.204 of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations so that any American citizen could come and go as they please…

Analysts from the Cuba Policy Foundation estimate that if the federal government were to completely lift the travel ban, approximately 1 million Americans would take advantage of their newfound liberty in the first year alone. This would not only be a boon to the Cuban economy, but to the American tourist economy as well. Lifting the travel ban would create thousands of additional jobs at US airlines, cruise ships, tour operators, travel agents, hotels, restaurants, etc. The CPF estimates that in the first year the U.S. economy would grow by about $545 million in GDP and 3,797 new jobs in the first year. As business becomes more established we could be talking about the range of $2 billion in additional economic output and 12,180 new jobs in the United States alone.

Why stop there? Raúl Castro has taken significant steps to liberalize the Cuban economy by allowing private citizens to own their homes and establish small businesses. Why doesn’t the Obama administration allow U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba to meet aspiring entrepreneurs who might want to take out a micro-loan? If a Cuban guy in Holguín wants to open up a pizzeria, why should U.S. trade law prevent him from importing Cabot cheese and Hormel pepperoni?If a lady in Camagüey wants to open up a beauty parlor, is there any logical reason for the U.S. Treasury Department to prevent her from importing Revlon makeup and Pantene shampoo? As it now stands, draconian U.S. trade regulations are stifling Cuba’s transition to a market economy!

Thanks to a crack in the embargo enacted by Congress in 2000, the Treasury Department now allows a modest amount of food exports to Cuba for “humanitarian” reasons each year. Embargo notwithstanding, many Cubans are voracious consumers of American-made rice and beans, mayonnaise and hot sauce to the tune of $560 million a year. Nevertheless, these food exports are subject to extremely stifling banking regulations which prohibit direct wiring of money for transactions. Any wiring of funds must be conducted through third-party countries, and much of the transacting is relegated to cash. If Congress were to relax the Cuba-specific banking regulations to the same level as regulations on money transfers to, say, the Dominican Republic, American farmers could be making between $200 to $300 million in additional revenues.

The Cuban market imports $9 billion of refined oil, food, farm machinery and chemicals every year. It should be one of the greatest markets for U.S. goods. But U.S. goods now constitute only 6.3% of the country’s imports because the market is dominated by the Venezuelans, Chinese, and Spaniards whose governments allow essentially free trade to the country. Even the mighty Canadians are beating us in the competition to meet the Cuban market. We could add billions of dollars to the United States GDP by simply deleting a couple of antediluvian trade restrictions from the U.S. Code.

So why doesn’t Congress simply repeal the Helms-Burton Act and allow Americans to trade with Cubans? There remains the disproportionately powerful bloc of Cubans émigrés still smarting from the events of 1959. Both parties see Florida as the sine qua non of victory in the presidential and Congressional elections, so most "serious" candidates are scared of casting a vote that might let their opponents cast them as “soft on Communism.” Moreover, now that Cuba hawk Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl.) is the Chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the prospects for reform are stalled so long as the Republicans maintain a majority in the House.

But yesterday's electoral calculations of Cuban-American/Floridian politics are now as relevant to modern needs as a VHS rental store. Nowadays, a clear majority of Cuban-Americans are in favor of ending the embargo and normalizing relations with the Cuban government. Indeed, many second- and third-generation Cuban-Americans are willing to rethink the embargo because - historical injustices aside - they realize that they would stand the most to benefit if it were curtailed. Fluent hispanophone Cuban-American youth are going to be the most valuable employees in boomtown post-embargo Miami.

The embargo on Cuba has never been an effective means of strangling the Communist regime into submission, it never will be, and it’s about time that Congress finaly adopts a trade policy with Cuba which reflects the facts. It's also about time that Congress adopts a trade policy with Cuba which reflects the needs of the United States economy. The Cuba hawks who vote to uphold the 52-year-old embargo are like the Imperial Japanese soldiers found guarding Indonesian islets well into the 1970s because they never got the memo that their war was over. We can no longer afford to continue humoring the old Cold Warriors’ delusions. It’s time to finally open trade with Cuba.

Express Conditions and the Doctrine of Prevention in The Muppets

2011-11-27T11:58:00.000-08:00

In 1979 Kermit the Frog, on behalf of the Muppets, entered into a “standard rich and famous” contract with studio executive Lew Lord. The fine print of the contract included a clause which transferred the Los Angeles property of the Muppet Studios to energy magnate Tex Richman for the ostensible purpose of establishing a museum. An express condition of this contract, buried in the fine print, stipulated that the Muppets shall relinquish all rights to the property, and that these rights will transfer to Richman unless Mr. The Frog can raise $10 million by a certain date in 2011.

It is apparent that Lew Lord wrote this contract in bad faith. When Kermit the Frog signed the “standard rich and famous” contract in 1979, he apparently did not realize that Lew Lord’s standard form contract included any language regarding the Muppet Studios property. Most importantly, even though Kermit did sign away the rights to the property, the language suggested that the purpose of this transfer was to build a museum. Richman’s ulterior motive for purchasing the land was to extract valuable oil deposits which lay beneath the old Muppet Studios. Hence this disagreement constitutes a serious matter of non-disclosure. If the Muppets knew that there were oil deposits under the property and Richman’s true interest in purchasing the property was in their extraction, then it is unlikely that Kermit the Frog would have agreed to the sale on these terms or at all. Therefore, if Richman were to sue for specific performance, the Muppets can raise the matters of non-disclosure and general bad faith dealing for a rescission of the contract.

In addition, the Muppets attempted to raise the $10 million as stipulated as an express condition to void the transfer of the Muppet Studios complex to Richman – and they did substantially perform upon this condition by raising $9,999.99 in a Telethon. The Muppets unarguably failed to meet this express condition, despite the fact that they engaged in unlawful behavior and kidnapped Jack Black in attempting to do so. Fozzie Bear even posed the question, “What’s more illegal – minorly inconveniencing Jack Black or letting Tex Richman take over Muppet Studios?”; the rest of the Muppets replied, “Kidnapping Jack Black!” Whether or not a court might find that the Muppets committed the criminal act of kidnapping or merely the intentional tort of wrongful imprisonment appears to be a moot point because this act was merely incidental to the Muppets’ attempt to raise $10 million and fulfill the terms of the contract.

Indeed, the Muppets did not fulfill the express condition of the contract pertaining to the raising of $10 million in order to prevent the transfer of the Muppet Studios to Richman. However, Richman acted in bad faith by sabotaging the Muppet Theater’s electric and phone lines, plunging the theater in darkness and preventing the phone bankers from receiving monetary pledges. According to the Doctrine of Prevention, a condition of a contract is excused if one of the parties wrongfully hinders of prevents the condition from occurring. It is apparent that Richman’s sabotage of the electric and phone lines was intended to prevent the Muppets from fulfilling the condition pertaining to the raising of $10 million, and thus a court would most likely excuse the non-performance of this condition.

The Muppets did not fulfill one of the express conditions of the contract, and under normal circumstances a California court would most likely hold that the terms of the contract are binding and that Tex Richman is the rightful owner of the Muppet Studios property. However, it appears unlikely that a court would enforce the contract’s language regarding the transfer of the Muppet Studios to Richman due to the Lew Lord’s bad faith dealing and Richman's wrongful activity in attempt to prevent the Muppets from fulfilling the terms of the contract.

How Committed is America to Fighting the Lord's Resistance Army?

2011-10-29T15:46:00.001-07:00

Does the United States have a strategic interest in the stability of Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo? If so, is our national security interest in this region compelling enough to justify U.S. military intervention to eliminate the Lord’s Resistance Army? Are the American people committed enough to the outcome of this conflict to justify the deployment of an already-overstretched military, the allocation of scarce resources in a time of budget austerity, and potential American casualties?

One would hope so, because the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) is now committed to a new campaign to aid the governments of Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in their long, painful effort to eliminate the Lord’s Resistance Army which has terrorized their countryside, killed at least 12,000, abducted as many as 75,000 and displaced up to 2 million civilians. President Obama justified this operation in an October 14th letter to the Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate.

On October 12, the initial team of U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment deployed to Uganda. During the next month, additional forces will deploy, including a second combat-equipped team and associated headquarters, communications, and logistics personnel. The total number of U.S. military personnel deploying for this mission is approximately 100. These forces will act as advisors to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA. Our forces will provide information, advice, and assistance to select partner nation forces. Subject to the approval of each respective host nation, elements of these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The support provided by U.S. forces will enhance regional efforts against the LRA. However, although the U.S. forces are combat equipped, they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self defense. All appropriate precautions have been taken to ensure the safety of U.S. military personnel during their deployment.

One can almost imagine that on the morning of October 15th, staffers at every single one of our nation’s Congressional offices and news outlets crashed the server of Wikipedia when they entered the same search terms in unison: “What is the Lord's Resistance Army?” …

Unlike Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya, the political discourse has seen no constitutionalist argument against Obama administration’s deployment of military advisers to Uganda because, well, there really is none. Yes, you read that correctly – the military intervention against the more obscure warlord in Central Africa whom no one has ever talked about, which Congress did not debate, is perfectly constitutionally fine. You see, back in May of 2010, Congress passed the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009; this law declared as official Congressional policy:

“To support stabilization and lasting peace in northern Uganda and areas affected by the Lord’s Resistance Army through development of a regional strategy to support multilateral efforts to successfully protect civilians and eliminate the threat posed by the Lord's Resistance Army and to authorize funds for humanitarian relief and reconstruction, reconciliation, and transitional justice, and for other purposes.”

Buried somewhere in this tangle of euphemism and understatement was the by-the-way authorization for the President to use military means to achieve this grand objective, so subtle that even the most discerning reader of Congressional resolutions might not have caught it. The prime mover behind the LRA Disarmament Act, the Senate’s erstwhile progressive icon Russell Feingold, was quite explicit in his intent; “supporting viable and legitimate efforts to disarm and demobilize the LRA is exactly the kind of thing in which AFRICOM should be engaged.”

If you might be scratching your head in puzzlement, don’t feel alone. This matter of war and peace, the weightiest of subjects that a democratic government might address, was simply slipped under the rug. On May 10, 2010, the Senate passed Feingold’s resolution with unanimous consent, and two days later the House of Representatives passed it by a voice vote – a procedural measure by which representatives’ positions are not even tabulated. At a time when the world was fixated on the heroic efforts needed to address the oil spill in the Gulf Coast and the earthquake in Haiti, apparently the most liberal of bleeding hearts in journalism did not consider as newsworthy the fact that Congress authorized the President to engage in military action against the Lord’s Resistance Army. At most it was buried in a one paragraph blurb on page A24

There never was an earnest debate on this issue at all. Congress treated a resolution authorizing the use of military force as essentially just another symbolic resolution to rename a post office or congratulate the St. Louis Cardinals on their World Series championship. The Beltway media followed suite.

This blogger remains undecided as to whether or not President Obama did the right thing by sending 100 military advisers to Uganda. I am ashamed to admit that I do not know as much as I should know about a security issue facing four of Africa’s 55 countries in which I have never lived, which I have only read about, and on which I know nothing more than anyone else who follows BBC Africa.

However, I do have a very strong opinion on the fact that President Obama’s recent decision to send troops to Uganda has demonstrated the American people’s and the American political class’ complete and utter disregard for anything happening in Africa. Not only are we as a nation ignorant about African affairs, but we are not very interested in educating ourselves about them. The now patently-offensive term – “The Dark Continent” – unfortunately remains an apt moniker for how a continent home to 1 billion of the world’s population remains a black hole to which American thought rarely penetrates and from which some of the world’s greatest tragedies and triumphs of the human spirit never escape to see the light of day. One could retort that maybe it takes a military intervention to stimulate demand for journalistic assignments, research grants and course enrollment. After all, it was not until we invaded Afghanistan that most Americans could be bothered to care about the plight of women in Kandahar, it wasn’t until American boys were stationed in Iraq that any noticeable iota of Americans cared to learn the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites. Maybe, one argues, now that we have troops in Uganda, Congressmen and military academicians might finally take note of this long-ignored part of the world.

The obligatory Congressional hearing on the U.S. deployment to Uganda demonstrated no such thing.

“What is the strategic interest of the United States in doing this?” asked Gerry Connolly (D-Virg.), “I mean, there are lots of unpleasant people in the world. There are lots of insurgencies and terrorist movements in the world. The United States obviously cannot try to dethrone every one of them.”

Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) dismissed the LRA – which has killed at least 12,000, abducted as many as 75,000 and displaced in the environs of 2 million people – as “not a sophisticated insurgency” because they have not used high-tech weaponry.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Cali.) and Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) utilized the hearings as a soapbox to decry government spending and the federal deficit.

Representatives Connolly, Duncan, Rohrabacher and Schmidt should receive steak knives for at least bothering to show up to the discussion. Most Republican candidates running to be the Leader of the Free World have not even issued press releases on the subject.

Stunningly, the most prominent voice in American politics to give U.S. intervention in Uganda anything resembling due air time was Rush Limbaugh. In a radio segment titled “Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians”, Limbaugh somehow managed to take the side of the Lord’s Resistance Army as a proxy in the Global War between Christian Civilization and Islamic Barbarism.

[The] Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God… They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops, to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda.

One of the most powerful mouthpieces on the Right demonstrated that he was willing to opine and bloviate on an issue as seminal as war and peace without having even taken the time to so much as Google: “Lord’s Resistance Army” or leaf through the World Almanac. And think about how many countless Republican voters and legislators take their cues from Limbaugh. This is how the American political class formulates its Africa policies.

I would hope that the American people, media and political class take this issue a bit more seriously. Sure, there are now only 100 military advisers in Uganda – just few dozen less than there will be in Iraq by New Year’s Day. Sure, they constitute a relative few, and they are only serving in an advisory role – for now. But the American tradition of intervention in faraway lands has proven time and time again to be particularly susceptible to a thing called “mission creep”; we are a people who generally prefer escalating our mission to accepting defeat.

As much as Obama, Feingold, et al. are right to acknowledge the importance of African stability to global security and the potential of AFRICOM, I am concerned that the generally dovish Democrats so blithely justified this mission on security grounds. This mission in Central Africa does not appear to have much if anything to do with the vital interests of the United States or our allies. It is unclear whether this mission has clearly defined political and military objectives, or whether the U.S. military even has the capacity to defeat a guerrilla insurgency in the midst of the remote jungles and savannas of the Ugandan, South Sudanese, Congolese and Central African Republican interior. It remains hazy just how committed the U.S. military establishment is to defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army. Most importantly, there does not appear to be that much wholehearted support of U.S. public opinion. If U.S. military intervention in Central Africa were to escalate to a combat role, it wouldn’t pass the requirements of the Weinberger Doctrine.

I am concerned that the general ignorance of all things African is not limited to Republican isolationists. But for a few policy analysts in the State Department, the vast majority of the most genuinely-committed, TOMS Shoes-wearing do-gooders must concede general ignorance of the politics of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Yes, I’m sure you’ve read plenty of newsletters from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – I get those emails too. Nevertheless, I would beg the “Save the World” camp to maintain a healthy level of skepticism before marching to the trumpets of the just war. It was only months ago that the outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a class of West Point cadets, “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined.’”

Does the U.S. misson to defeat the Lord's Resistance Army fulfill the rigors of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine? Is the humanitarian crisis in Uganda as imminently catastrophic as the situation in Benghazi might have been had NATO not enforced a no-fly zone? Why is the humananitarian crisis in Uganda worthy of U.S. intervention when the humanitarian crises in Darfur, Abyei, Côte d’Ivoire, Zimbabwe, et al., are not? President Obama has not adequately explained to the American people why this mission is necessary and consistent with U.S. foreign policy. An open letter to the Speaker of the House and the Presiden Pro Tempore of the Senate hardly suffices.

Just because a certain faction in an African conflict is systematically violating the human rights of civilians does not meant that the opposing faction in that conflict is genuinely interested in upholding those civilians’ human rights. Just because the Ugandan government is fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army does not mean that the Ugandan government is worthy of U.S. military aid. Strongman Yoweri Musevini, who has ensconced himself in power for 25 years, has within the past months rigged his “re-election” and clamped down on pro-democracy demonstrators with teargas and water cannons. There is a strong human rights-based argument that the U.S. should curtail military aid to the Ugandan government – not increase it. Don't even get me started on the “Democratic Republic” of the Congo…

Moreover, just because the Lord’s Resistance Army might be one of the most evil, despicable terrorist groups in the modern world does not mean that deploying U.S. commandos to Uganda is necessarily going to make things any better. Fair arbiters of U.S. foreign policy should remain wary of military intervention even when it is done for purely humanitarian reasons – or rather, especially when it is done for purely humanitarian reasons.

For now I’m willing to give President Obama the benefit of a doubt, there is still a chance that this mission might just save a whole lot of people from a brutal warlord and his minions. But it remains the duty all Americans to take this opportunity to study more about the reasons why our troops are now in Uganda, ostensibly South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. The new U.S. military mission might do a lot of good for people in Africa, God willing it should be a great success. But when we are willing to send troops to far-flung corners of the world in complete ignorance, without earnest inquiry and debate, there is only reason to be concerned about the state of democracy in America.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-10-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

Dear loyal readers of Zacstravaganza,

I apologize profusely for my complete and utter lack of blogging since the semester began. Now that I am in the heat of my 1L year at American University Washington College of Law, I am so preoccupied with contracts, torts and civil procedure that unfortunately I have not been able to allocate due time to blogging.

I wish that I had more time to conduct primary source research and writing, but alas, I have only been able to express myself in tweet between classes and in creating my own LOLcats.

To tide you over, here are some topical LOLcats. I have been told that some of these are entertaining, though others fall as flat, painful bellyflops. Your commentary and insight is much appeciated.

Hopefully sometime in the near future I will be able to express myself in more erudite, long-form passages.

Male Circumcision is Not Genital Mutilation

2011-08-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

One evening I was dining with my anthropologist friend Natalie and I expressed just how viscerally and zealously I abhor the African practice of female genital mutilation. As a male champion of women’s rights and a lover of the female form I believe that there is no reason to hack off a pubescent girl’s clitoris and/or labia other than to make the act of intercourse painful, to deprive women of their inherent sexual freedom and to oppress them as a permanently subservient class. I think that female genital mutilation is such a patently wrong act, a reification of misogynist and phallocentric violence that should be prohibited and criminalized. Anyone who practices female genital mutilation is a menace to society, and our police forces should lock them up behind bars.

Natalie threw a wrench into my crusade for the sanctity of the clitoris; “But Zac, aren’t you Jewish?”

“Yeah, so? What’s that have to do with anything?”

She looked down in the direction under the table and cleared her throat.

At that moment I realized the hypocrisy of my zeal. I was so humbled and dressed down that I concluded that when speaking of subjects as delicate as a culture’s practices pertaining to the sexual organs – especially those of cultures that are not one’s one – perhaps one should generally abstain from casting matters in sweeping judgments of “right” and “wrong”. I’m not saying that one shouldn’t criticize the genital practices of foreign cultures; sometimes one must. But perhaps we should limit our analysis to those things that we can prove at least somewhat scientifically and avoid subjective critiques of metaphysics and postmodern gender theory.

My friend Natalie isn’t the only one who thinks that my righteous indignation against genital mutilation should apply to both genders. There is in fact a growing faction of feminists, human rights activists and lovers of the natural male form want to broaden the definition of assault to include those who circumcise the foreskin. The self-proclaimed “Intactivists” advocate for the preservation of “genital integrity” and an end to the practice of male circumcision – or “male genital mutilation” as they prefer to call it.

One such group known as the Bay Area Intactivists values the foreskin as a nerve-rich portion of the male genital organ. From their perspective, male circumcision is means of denying to a male and his future partner(s) the potential for maximum sexual satisfaction.

Other groups such as Intact America are organizing the opposition to male circumcision from comparatively more scientific, rationally more compelling grounds. If you read their literature, you get the sense that they represent a faction within the American medical community who oppose the practice under the logic that 1. the act of circumcision can be painful; 2. it can lead to infections and other harmful complications, and 3. removing the foreskin is not medically necessary.

Now the combined Intactivists of San Francisco have garnered enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot which extend the definition of assault to those who circumcise males under the age of 18. If the proposition passes, the circumcising of a male’s foreskin would be a misdemeanor offense punishable by up to a $1,000 fine or up to one year in jail. The consent of the underage male in question would be irrelevant; a male could only consent to having his foreskin removed if he is a legal adult. There would be no religious exemptions.

The movement to utilize the compelling force of criminal law to prohibit male circumcision is not without foundation. After all, since federal legislation was passed in 1996, Section 116 of the U.S. Code has defined whomever “circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years” as a perpetrator of assault. The Intactivists make a reverse-sexist argument that by creating a set of legal protections for women – but not extending those same protections to men – the continued legality of male circumcision is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

As much as this blogger disagrees with the claims of the Intactivists, I am equally critical of the campaign by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union who are arguing against the San Francisco ballot measure in terms of religious freedom. If a federal judge were to strike down a municipal ordinance banning male circumcision because it is a violation of the Jewish people’s freedom to exercise our religion, then that same judge would have to uphold the right of West African Muslims to practice female genital mutilation on the same grounds. This would be an argument of cultural relativism; e.g. “Yes, it is a barbaric practice, but we live in a barbaric society in which cruelty and torture are woven into the fabric of our culture.” This is not the argument that the defenders of male circumcision ought to take.

If defenders of circumcision are going to make a valid argument based on moral logic and reason, one must contend why the practice itself is not just a tolerable tradition with religious significance but actually a positive good with secular and tangible benefits. And moreoever, it doesn't hurt to deconstruct the logic for the argument against circumcision.

From what I gather after a comprehensive reading of their literature, the moral logic of the Intactivist movement runs as following:

1. Female circumcision is a cruel, inhumane practice which can cause disease and pain over the course of the victim’s lifetime. (Given)
2. The only reason why cultures practice female circumcision is to make the act of sexual intercourse excruciatingly painful and undesirable. (Given)
3. Therefore, female circumcision is a form of assault (1, 2)
4. Gender is only a social construct, there is no substantive difference between men and women, in fact, the binary characterization of human beings as either men or women is a form of gendered chauvinism. (Given)
5. Therefore, male circumcision is also a cruel, inhumane practice (1, 4)
6. Therefore, the only reason why Western culture practices male circumcision is to make the act of sexual intercourse excruciatingly painful and undesirable (2, 4)
7. Therefore, male circumcision is a form of assault (5, 6) Q.E.D.

The crucial fallacy in this logical argument is postulate number 4. Though traditional gender roles and identities might be a mere social construction, it is more than fair to say that there is, in fact, at least one significant difference between the vast majority of individuals born as males or female; generally speaking, males are endowed with penises and females are endowed with vaginas. In light of this fundamental distinction, the removal of the clitoris and/or the labia should be banned while the removal of the foreskin should remain legal because there is in fact a very compelling case to be made that male circumcision and female “circumcision” are two very different operations performed on two very different organs which ought to be distinguished as such under law.

Intactivists’ Sophistry #1: “Surgically removing part of a baby boy’s penis causes pain.”

If one were to practice circumcision with the same crude instruments and techniques as say, the Dogon tribe of Mali, then it is indeed an unnecessary painful procedure. The Dogons gather all of the uncircumcised boys 12 years old and up and to have the village blacksmith remove the boys’ foreskins with a homemade blade which is not very sharp by Western standards – and they perform the operation without any sort of anesthetic. Perhaps this argument over pain might be valid if Jews in America were to practice circumcision in a way similar to the Dogons; if that were the case, maybe circumcision should be prohibited under law.

The modern Diasporic Jews of America, however, have developed a method of circumcising our boys at the age of eight days when the nerves of the appendage are not as sensitive as a pubescent boy and we utilize various means of anesthesia which all but eliminate pain. The most effective of these is nerve-block applied locally with a shot to the penis – a remarkably effective anesthetic which renders the applied area completely numb. Rabbinical student Josh Stanton and Dr. Anne Epstein write: “While the idea of an injection to the penis sets teeth on end, it is as close to pain-free as we can get in this sort of minor surgery… It hardly hurts.”

Just about any operation involving the cutting of flesh – even an operation as minor as a tonsillectomy or the removal of an ingrown toenail – would be painful without anesthesia. But if the prick of a needle was reason to ban a medical procedure on the basis of pain, then banning circumcision would make no more sense than banning tetanus or polio vaccinations. In this day and age of modern anesthetics, the contention that circumcision should be banned because the procedure causes pain holds little ground.

Intactivists’ Sophistry #2: “Male circumcision creates immediate health risks and can lead to serious complications.”

Indeed, a botched circumcision could lead to an infection of the penis or worse. In cultures that perform this operation with crude tools and unsanitary conditions – such as the Dogon blacksmiths with their homemade iron blades – yes, the removal of a boy’s foreskin does sometimes lead to more serious complications including not only local infections but hemorrhage, scarring, difficulty urinating, loss of part or all of the penis, and even death. According to the Center for Disease Control, between 2% and 8% of all circumcisions performed in African cultures lead to an infection or more serious complications.

However, such fears are essentially unwarranted in the developed West because we utilize modern medical practices, the doctors and mohels who perform circumcisions are rigorously trained, and we perform the operation in a sanitary environment. Even if the most basic aspect of male circumcision remains the same, the cleanliness of our foreskin-cutting arenas, our medical instruments and our practices make a world of a difference. Local infection is still nevertheless possible – but then again, even having your bellybutton pierced can lead to an infection if it is not done by the right person in the right place the right way.

Whether an adequately trained, certified mohel conducts a circumcision in a synagogue or if a bona fide doctor circumcises a baby boy in a hospital, the risk of immediate health risks with serious complications is extremely small. According to the CDC, the rate of complications due to male circumcision in the United States is around 0.2% of all cases – in other words, just about negligible.

Indeed, the medical Intactivists are correct when they argue that male circumcision can cause infections – there is that 1 case in 500 in which the circumcision does lead to a complication – but that fact cannot be adequately evaluated in isolation. In a study of circumcised boys in Washington State conducted over the course of a decade, it was found that for every circumcision complication there were 6 urinary tract infections prevented. Circumcision also reduces the chance of contracting human papillomavirus (and thereby penile cancer), genital herpes and HIV.

Intactivists’ Sophistry #3: “Male circumcision is unnecessary” because “Claims that circumcision prevents HIV have repeatedly been proven to be exaggerated or false. Only abstinence or safe sex, including the use of condoms, can prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS.”

At this point in the evolution of homo sapiens, the continued possession of a foreskin actually poses a risk to the health of males and those who have sex with them. The main reason why not circumcising a boy creates a health risk is that this vestigial structure creates a cavity which can retain smegma which can sit and fester, inviting bacterial and viral infection. Uncircumcised males are more likely to contract and transmit HIV than those who are circumcised, largely because the smegma which can be retained in the foreskin allows for the transmission of the virus to and from vaginal fluids. In addition, the foreskin has considerable surface area which renders the penis more susceptible to minor trauma and ulcerative disease – thus increasing the chance of transmitting the HIV virus.

A 2000 study of the relationship between male circumcision and heterosexual transmission of HIV in Africa noted “a substantial protective effect of male circumcision on risk for HIV infection”; finding that the risk of HIV infection in circumcised men was 44% lower than those who were uncircumcised. The strongest association between circumcision or lack thereof and HIV infection rates was found in high risk populations (e.g. patients at STD clinics) for whom the adjusted relative risk was 71% lower for those who had been circumcised. Another study conducted in 2003 found that the risk of HIV infection in circumcised men was 42% lower than their uncircumcised counterparts.

More macro-level epidemiological studies indicate that the practice of circumcision is not limited to the individual men but also the population as a whole; after all, if a man has contracted HIV due to his smegma-retaining foreskin, he is then liable to transmit the virus to his sexual partner(s), who are then liable to transmit the virus to their sexual partners, etc. African and Asian countries in which less than 20% of the male population has been circumcised have HIV infection rates several times greater than comparable African and Asian countries in which more than 80% of the male population has been circumcised. Of course, there are many other variable including religious mores and sexual norms which also vary among these countries, but the link between relatively high rates of circumcision and relatively low rates of HIV infection is so strong that the value of the practice as a significant factor in reducing disease transmission cannot be ignored.

I have heard a number of objections to this kind of analysis; namely that such studies have only been performed in underdeveloped Third World nations and not the developed West. These skeptics contend that since Americans and Europeans have better hygiene than the typical African, since we generally practice monogamy, wear condoms and bathe regularly we do not need to bother with circumcision.

Such First World-centrics are faulty in their reasoning, particularly because the studies linking the lack of circumcision to higher rates of HIV infection found the greatest correlation in the most at risk populations – precisely those persons in the United States who are the most likely to have sex with multiple or even concurrent partners, those who do not wear condoms, and those who have the worst hygiene. The mere fact that one might reside in the Global North does not separate that person from the basic facts of virology which tend to be associated with the Global South. Likewise, if circumcision has been found to be an effective method of minimizing the HIV epidemic amongst homo sapiens in sub-Saharan Africa, absent any fundamental anatomical or physiological distinction between Americans and Africans, there is only reason to conclude that that practice remains effective amongst homo sapiens in the United States.

I have also heard the argument made that circumcision is unnecessary for homosexual men, because the studies cited above have only demonstrated a link between circumcision and reduced prevalence of HIV amongst heterosexual men. This Intactivist argument maintains that for a parent to decide that they will circumcise their boy to protect him from HIV and AIDS is to make a heteronormative assumption that their child is in fact straight, and that if their boy turns out to be gay then they will be deprived of sexual satisfaction due to a societal bias towards heterosexuality.

This Intactivist sophistry is not only spurious in its logic but quite dangerous in its potential for giving homosexuals a false sense of security. Though the possession of a foreskin is most likely to transmit disease via the mixing of smegma and vaginal fluids – which is exclusive to heterosexual intercourse, that is not the only reason why possession of the foreskin increases the chance of disease transmission. Disease can also be transmitted because the foreskin is more easily susceptible to tearing. One must also take bisexuality into consideration; an uncircumcised man could very easily receive the HIV virus by trading fluids with an HIV+ woman and later on transmit the virus to a male sexual partner (or the other way around) explicitly due to his possession of his original foreskin.

Read Intact America’s sophistry again: “Only abstinence or safe sex, including the use of condoms, can prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS.” This is more or less the logic of abstinence-only sex education; “if you don’t have sex, then you can’t get a sexually-transmitted disease; therefore don't wear a condom”; “if you always wear a condom, then you can’t get a sexually-transmitted disease; therefore you don’t need to be circumcised.” The problem with this logic is that uncircumcised men do have sex, sometimes they use condoms, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they have sex with a condom but the condom breaks, etc. Even the highest-quality prophylactics can fail - that is why instead of relying on the effectiveness of one or two disease prevention methods, it is best to employ as many as possible.

Intact America is telling the truth when its literature states that circumcision is not the only way to prevent the transmission of HIV, that abstaining from sex or practicing safe sex are alternative ways of preventing disease transmission. But they're not telling the whole truth. “Male circumcision is unnecessary”; indeed, for a practitioner of celibacy there might not be much of a benefit, but for everyone else it remains a very sound, particularly effective means of reducing the transmission of disease. There is no silver bullet which can by itself inoculate an individual from HIV/AIDS, no one is claiming that circumcision can by itself rid the world of this deadly epidemic. Rather, medical proponents of circumcision are contending that it is but one of many practices which ought to be maintained – along with fidelity to one’s partner, safe sex, regular testing – in order to defend oneself from STD transmission.

Likewise, the Intactivist movement is making a grave mistake in trying to ban male circumcision under the guise of public health; their pseudo-scientific case to ban the practice is so full of misleading language, cherry-picked half-truths and outright falsehoods that it cannot be taken seriously. Perhaps there are other reasons why a parent might reasonably decide to opt to not circumcise their male child – religious, sexual, aesthetic or otherwise – but the health of the child is not one of them. Male circumcision is not genital mutilation; it is a sound medical procedure which is safe, which does not cause undue pain, and it is still a very effective component of our society's efforts to maintain men's health and curb the spread of disease in America and throughout the world.

Medicare Should Be More Like a Pizza

2011-06-12T09:17:00.001-07:00

by Herman Cain

Our Medicare system is facing a fiscal crisis. What we need to solve the financial crisis in our Medicare system is not a bunch of professional politicians. What we need is a businessman with the common sense understanding of how economics works, someone who knows how to run a successful enterprise, someone like me, Herman Cain, the former CEO and turnaround wizard of Godfather’s Pizza.

This visionary, Herman Cain, has taken major franchises with financial troubles and turned them around with my business know-how and ingenuity. And I can tell you that the biggest problem with Medicare that needs to be turned around is that it’s run from the top down by the Government. For example, let’s say that you were hungry and wanted to eat a pizza. Let me ask you – would you walk down to City Hall and ask the Government to bake you a deep-dish Omaha, Nebraska-style pizza pie? No, you wouldn’t, because Government bureaucrats are not particularly skilled in that particular trade! You would continue walking down the street until you arrived at a private business establishment specializing in the production of deep-dish Omaha, Nebraska-style pizza pies; for example, Godfather’s Pizza.

Medicare does not offer consumers a choice. Medicare says that the Government is going to distribute to everyone the same health insurance coverage at the same price regardless of their needs or desires. Imagine if you walked to the pizza parlor, you sit down at a table and the waitress serves you a vegetarian pizza with spinach, eggplant and artichokes – and you’re like, “Hey, I wanted pepperoni and anchovies!” And then the waitress is like “Tough – deal with it.” And then 10 minutes later the waitress serves you a side-order of Cinnasticks and you’re like “But I didn’t order these!” and she’s like “Yeah, well we’re serving it to you anyway”. And you, the customer, have to pay the bill at the end even though not one of your needs were efficiently met. That would be Big Government Socialism straight out of The Communist Manifesto, that’s what it would be. Just like Medicare.

As the founder of Godfather’s Pizza, I know that you need to offer your customers a choice to fit their personal needs. At Godfather’s Pizza, we have a menu of all the different sizes and toppings and various options available. Let’s say you the customer want a Meat Lover’s Pizza with pepperoni, bacon and meatballs – that is what you will be served. If you want a Hawaiian Pizza with a Stuffed Crust add-on – the free market will provide it with the utmost quality and efficiency. You order what you want, you pay for what you order – that is how capitalism works, my friend.

Therefore, if I – Herman Cain – am elected President, I will pledge to increase the range of options and flexibility offered to customers. I will call this initiative “Expanding the Medicare Menu”. Let’s say that you the customer wants just your basic insurance coverage for annual physicals and catastrophic care – you would pay for one price. But if you want toppings, that will cost you extra. If you want cancer insurance you pay an additional fee. If you want diabetes insurance you pay an additional fee. you the customer should be able to anticipate what sort of medical issues you might need to pay for in the foreseeable future and you pay for that topping. If you aren’t sleeping around then why should you pay for some promiscuous harlot’s abortion insurance? That would be like if you want a cheese pizza and the guy behind you in line wants broccoli and meatballs and both of you pay the same price! Socialism!

Another problem with Medicare is the free-rider problem. You have all these people who are working hard, paying their dues – those people should be able to get the Medicare coverage they deserve. But you have all these free-riders who choose not to work, who think that they can just sit on their booty and have society pay for their Medicare for them. That’s not right.

That would be like if you went into Godfather’s Pizza with your wife and kids and sit down on our patio and you order a Jumbo deep-dish pizza pie with peppers and mushrooms and a side of garlic knots. And then as you’re trying to enjoy your pizza which you paid for with your hard-earned money – and some bum on the street walks up and says “Hey Mister, could you please gimme a slice?” That would be bogus, that’s what it would be. If that happened to me, I’d say “Hey Bum, can’t you see that I’m trying to enjoy my hard-earned dinner with my family? Why don’t you go buy your own pizza pie?”

Our Medicare system today is run like a soup kitchen for a bunch of homeless bums. If you want to be served, you have to wait on line. And then you have to fill out all these forms to prove that you are in fact a bum. And the servers take so long because not even staffed by professionals but by volunteers. And those few times when it is actually professionals working at Medicare they feel like they can serve you all slow and stuff because they’re unionized and they can’t get fired no matter how bad their service is. That is why the service is so inferior – because you get what you pay for, and when it’s a bunch of corrupt union bosses and patchouli-stinking trustafarian rabble-rousers running the assembly line, your service is going to be of poor quality.

At Godfather’s Pizza our service is prompt and speedy. We guarantee that if you order your pizza delivered that it will be at your doorstep in 30 minutes. If your pizza gets delivered in 40 minutes then you shouldn’t tip the delivery boy and that would be their punishment for such poor service. Likewise, we should bust the public employees union that the Medicare workers are in and restructure their pay rates so they get compensated on commission and with tips. That way, they will bust their butts to get health insurance provided to the customer quickly with no waiting and no lines.

The Liberals might say, “Herman Cain, I disagree with you. I think that Medicare should be run by a Big Government Nanny State because what about all the lazy bums who can’t afford to pay for health insurance? We have to tolerate some inefficiency to help those lazy bums.” To those excusers of sloth and enablers of dependence, I, Herman Cain, say this: “No, you are wrong. You are wrong because those bums should get their act together and pull themselves by their own bootstraps and get a job so they can pay for health insurance themselves.”

Those mollycoddle Liberals would probably say “But Herman Cain, you are being insensitive to all the lazy bums who are unemployed, they can’ t get a job because the economy is in a deep, prolonged recession.” Well to those mollycoddles I would say “Do you think that I , Herman Cain, came to be who I am because I was just handed life on a silver platter? No, I have my job as the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza because I have a demonstrated record of accomplishment and success in the business world – that’s why I am employed and that’s how I can afford to have health insurance.

If everyone could just believe in the American Dream like I do and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps then even the lazy bums could be the Founder and CEO of their own business. Then everyone would be able to pay for their own health insurance on Medicare’s New and Improved Health Insurance Menu like at Godfather’s Pizza. And then everyone would have the health insurance package they want at a price they can afford a low price, with no lines, no waiting and no Big Government telling them what to do. Now that is what America is all about!

Help Fight Human Trafficking in Nepal!

2011-05-31T19:58:00.000-07:00

Partly thanks to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, the Liam Neeson flick Taken and the insightful columns of Nicholas Kristof, Western audiences are finally waking up to the harsh realities of human trafficking and the modern day slave trade. In the United States of America where (at least in the Union states) our sense of political values and social justice are largely inherited from ante bellum Abolitionism, many citizens whose consciousnesses have been expanded to this present evil are eager to learn what they can do to help. Unfortunately, the worst of the worst of this problem is confined to the domestic slave markets of Africa and Asia and thus it is daunting for stateside abolitionists to get involved. However, two of my activist friends are organizing to do some real promising work to fight human trafficking in Nepal – and they would appreciate your help.

The first of these modern day abolitionists is my old pal Dan Linden from Katonah, New York. Dan is perhaps the most unlikely of activists – he is a classical Spanish guitarist by training, a music instructor by trade, and he has spent the past few years teaching Nepalese schoolchildren about scales and chords. Nevertheless, the blatantly visible commerce in sex slaves in his adopted Nepal has so horrified Mr. Linden that he has been roused into action as a matter of conscience. In his own words:

Nepalese girls, as young as six and at a rate of about fifteen a day, are drugged and taken to India by people they know and trust, or are lured my false promises of job opportunities there. It is estimated that there are 200,000 sex slaves in the Kamathipura district of Mumbai alone, living in horrific conditions in what are known as “the cages.” Upon arrival, those who refuse will be raped, brutally beaten or burned with cigarettes or even threatened to be buried alive until they break. They will then begin a routine of forced sex with as many as forty customers a day. The younger girls may be forced to live most of their childhoods under a bed until they are old enough to be desirable to customers.

While in Nepal I was pleased to observe firsthand as a woman from Maiti Nepal boarded the bus I was on and questioned passengers, deciphering whether one of the girls on board might be a victim. Maiti Nepal is an organization founded by Anuradha Koirala which works on many fronts to fight sex trafficking including raising awareness in the villages most at risk of losing their daughters, intercepting traffickers and those being trafficked on bus routes, and providing health care, a home and career opportunities for those who have been rescued.

In an effort to support Maiti Nepal’s courageous efforts, Dan is hosting a fundraiser on June 14 at 6 PM at the Katonah Village Library in Katonah, NY. There will be a viewing of the film The Day My God Died followed by a discussion with the Massachusetts non-profit organization Friends of Maiti Nepal, who work in partnership with Ms. Koirala. For more information, or if you would like to make a donation online, please visit Maiti Nepal or Friends of Maiti Nepal.

Other abolitionists are working to combat human trafficking via more non-traditional methods. My lovely cousin Anya Cherneff has spent the past five years studying for her Masters at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and campaigning against human trafficking. Understanding that slavery is fundamentally the symptom of underdeveloped economies and sheer desperation, Anya decided to try a new demand-side angle to the problem; If so many women and men find themselves in bad “jobs” because they are forced to take risky offers to survive, why not create an alternative for them—a space for choice?

Anya’s fiancée Bennett Cohen has been implementing fossil fuel use reduction strategies and studying natural resource management for the past five years. After years of working to affect change in the developed world he had an idea: why not get it right the first time with community-scale renewable energy projects in the developing world?

So Anya and Bennett decided to join forces and combine their passions to promote gender equality and clean energy in marginalized communities. They set off for Asia in search of inspiration and understanding. They met with organizations in Nepal, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand running community development projects, setting up social enterprises, micro-financing, fighting against sex trafficking, and bringing renewable power to marginalized communities. Everywhere they went people were interested in using renewable power in their communities and creating more jobs at home to reduce the need for migration and improve women’s social position. And so they are launching Empower Generation —an initiative to advance community sustainability and gender equality through the promotion of renewable energy technology, micro-enterprise and natural resource management.

For their first project, Anya and Bennett are trying to help out a Nepalese woman named Sita Adhikari who wants to set up a biogas system construction and maintenance company . The biogas systems will use locally available organic wastes – i.e. human and livestock fecal matter – to produce methane gas for energy supply. Empower Generation's current fundraiser provides the start-up capital for Sita's biogas business. To learn more, check out their blog and help contribute to the loan that Sita needs to start her biogas business! produce methane gas for energy supply.

I've already received some criticism for this post along the lines of "Hey Zac, I thought you had drank the Ayn Rand bug juice and you're totally against foreign aid. But now you're making a pitch for us to make donations?" I'm very sorry if my scribblings of criticism of foreign aid have given anyone that impression.

I'm not a critic of all aid projects - I'm just a critic of bad aid projects which don't work, because they discredit and denigrate those aid projects which do have greater potential for actually making a difference. I think that the philanthropically-minded amongst us should certainly act according to our hearts and donate our time, resources, and yes, sometimes even some of our expendable income to such projects. But before you cut a check to anyone, it's absolutely necessary to do a thorough job of researching the cause and the means by which Charity X, Y or Z aims to remedy the problem.

I think that Dan, Anya and Bennett's activism is worthwhile not just because they are my friends, relatives and soon-to-be relatives. Believe me, I have turned down many, many prior requests from good friends to utilize this blog as a soapbox because it takes a lot to win the Zac Mason Seal of Approval. Maiti Nepal is an established human rights organization that is working on the ground in that country to fight human trafficking, and from what I've read, I only have reason to believe that they are spending their donations in relatively cost-effective, sound avenues. And though Empower Generation has yet to become a household name, that is because this initiative is brand new and just about to take off. I think that Anya and Bennett are brilliant young activists with the human rights know-how and the technical prowess to establish an organization that provides actual market-based solutions to the fundamentally economic problem of human trafficking. Like with any fledgling enterprise, there is of course an element of risk to investing in something new - but I trust these individuals so much that I must conclude that investing in Empower Generation is a risk worth taking.

HIV/AIDS Activism: Lost in Translation

2011-05-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

After dedicating two years of my life to the cause of sustainable development in the Republic of Mali, I came to loathe so-called "aid" projects which are unnecessarily expensive, relatively ineffective, and either achieve their intended goals at an obscenely high ratio of costs to benefits or they accomplish absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps the greatest potential for stupid, wasteful “aid” projects lies in the sub-field of HIV/AIDS education. Part of it is because HIV/AIDS is such a relatively trendy cause and there is simply such a volume of Western aid dollars allocated to HIV/AIDS projects that there is so much more potential for waste. Part of it is because HIV/AIDS is such an ideologically-loaded subject that Western do-gooders are wont to apply their own belief systems onto poor, unwitting Africans. And part of it is that benevolent do-gooders are so completely ignorant of their host country’s culture that when they try to intervene in matters of sexuality they are simply doomed to failure.

Imagine a couple of humanitarian aid professionals – one has a Masters in African Studies from Yale, another went to Princeton to get their Ph.D. in International Relations. A well-meaning NGO just raised $200,000 to send them to do something about AIDS in some poor West African country, say, Niger. So they are sitting around the air-conditioned boardroom of their NGO in the expatriate quarter of Niamey, brain-storming ways to raise the Nigerien people’s awareness about HIV transmission and prevention.

“What if we made a sign to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS?”

“Great idea! Let’s draw up a hundred of them and put them up along heavily-trafficked roads!”

So they will spend about $10,000 to hire a graphic designer in San Francisco who will email his design to a factory in Lyons which will manufacture a hundred or so signs for $20,000. And it will cost another $30,000 to ship the posts from Lyons to the port at Marseilles to the port at Lagos and overland to their NGO headquarters in Niamey. Another $15,000 will be lost to bribing the customs agents. And they will pay the local contractor some grossly inflated price, say, $25,000 to drive around the country, hammer posts in the ground and put up billboards along one lane-roads leading into various cities and towns in Niger.

So when everything is said and done, the perfectly benevolent NGO will have plopped down 100 billboards for a price of around $1,000 each to the grand total of $100,000. Take a hard look at this sign, scrutinize it for about a minute and try to understand why it is such a stupid, festering piece of garbage.

Every piece of information that could possibly be conveyed by this sign can only be understood by those who can read French. Officially, Niger is a Francophone country, there are indeed some people in this country who can speak French – a miniscule minority of teachers, doctors and police officers. But the overwhelming majority of the people only speak their native Hausa, Songraï, Peulh or Tamashek – it is not unfair to assume your typical market lady does not know any “White People Language” beyond “Bozu le Blanc sava sava byen”. Also, the vast majority of people in this country are absolutely illiterate; 71.3 percent of the population, according to the CIA World Factbook – and even that figure is padded by an extremely liberal definition of “literacy” which recognizes anyone who can scrawl their name as “literate”. To 9 out of 10 pedestrians who might be walking down the street in Niamey, that public service announcement might as well be written in ancient Greek.

Likewise, this billboard on the road to the Malian city of Koutiala is also a festering piece of garbage. Imagine you are an illiterate Minianka millet farmer riding your donkey cart to sell your goats at the Koutiala market – what useful lesson in disease prevention could you possibly gain from viewing this $1,000 sign?

This billboard was placed by the Christian NGO World Vision in my former home of Sanadougou. I will give them due credit for writing their public health message in Bambara – Mali’s vernacular lingua franca. It reads “Hey! Be careful, AIDS is here! There is no cure for it.”

Indeed, writing a public health message in Bambara is certainly more sensitive to the local culture compared to writing it in French. But this World Vision billboard is still fatally flawed by the fact that their message was written in any language at all; instead of writing their AIDS-prevention message in ancient Greek, they decided to write it in the equivalent of modern Greek.

To pass the time, I asked scores of my illiterate neighbors for their interpretations of this billboard on the road leading to town. Not a single person I asked was able to tell me that it had anything to do with HIV/AIDS. The closest thing to a logical response I ever heard was “don’t leave razor blades in your bed – they will cut you.”

Sometimes I wonder what part of “illiteracy ” these well-meaning Christian aid-givers don’t understand. To refer to someone as “illiterate” doesn’t me that they can’t fully appreciate the works of Proust; “illiterate” refers to an individual or a group of persons who cannot read or write anything at all. To refer to these cultures as “predominantly illiterate” is not at all a judgment of intelligence or character – it is simply a statement of fact. Likewise, one cannot mount an effective public health campaign in a country like Mali, Niger, Mauritania or Burkina Faso without taking into consideration that the vast majority of your intended audience in these countries is completely and utterly illiterate.

One time I met a World Vision missionary/humanitarian agent in Bamako and took issue with their billboard campaign. She accused me of “insulting the Malian people’s intelligence”; “I work with a number of local staff who are all very capable of reading and writing – one of my colleagues was educated at the Sorbonne and he can read English, French and German!”

This well-meaning church lady’s response was quite telling. When practitioners of “humanitarian aid” and “economic development” live in the expatriate Green Zones of their respective African capitols, they can manage to go months at a time interacting with only the extremely-Westernized, French- or even English-speaking, literate elite, completely sheltered from the social and economic realities of the other 99.999 percent of the population. Such an experience establishes an absurdly rose-tinted perspective of a country’s predominant living conditions – and it allows these naïve, bumbling do-gooders to waste all of their funds on projects which could only benefit the 0.001 percent of the indigenous population with whom they interact at official state functions and the American Club racquetball courts.

Here is another one of my favorite signs posted in the city of Koutiala. If you were a simple unlettered shepherd who speaks the hyper-literal Bambara language completely devoid of metaphor or simile, what would you interpret it to mean?

If I were an illiterate goat-herder, I would think that this billboard meant that AIDS is an anthropomorphic fire demon with a face and arms and legs. In a society where grown men are genuinely afraid of witches, warlocks, hairy field demons, mischievous forest demons and dwarf spirits with backwards feet, it makes perfect sense that benevolent Tubabs would seek to warn the Malian people about the anthropomorphic fire demons which have been wreaking havoc upon America. Likewise, I would interpret this billboard to mean that if this fire demon were to ever try to get into my house, I should push the door shut.

My all-time favorite HIV/AIDS public service announcement is the one line of billboards in Bamako which actually dares to show the image of a condom. Take a look at this public health campaign and try your best to imagine its unintended consequences.

Hardly any Malian men in Bamako ever buy condoms to wear while engaging in sexual intercourse, but – thanks to this fiasco of a public service announcement – when they do buy a condom they are likely to wear it on their two fingers. So they go to the brothel, they fuck a prostitute for 500 francs (~$1), they wear a 100 franc (~20¢) condom on their fingers, and – big surprise – they still contract HIV! So now if any of men or women ever get tested and discover that they are HIV+, they are going to go around telling everyone that either condoms don’t work or that it was the condom itself that transmitted HIV, and any lesson that the well-meaning NGOs might wish to convey will be thoroughly discredited in the public mind.

A ham-handed public health campaign like the infamous “finger bang” billboard is not merely ineffective in combating the transmission of HIV/AIDS – it actually makes the problem worse. Partly thanks to this train wreck of a public health campaign, many young men in Mali think that AIDS is just a hoax. Some have concluded that since people have followed the “finger condom” billboard’s instructions and contracted HIV, The White People are telling Black Africans to wear condoms because we want them to stop reproducing. Others think that AIDS is real, that it was concocted by the CIA to decimate the black population of Africa. Word on the street is that it’s the reservoir tip of the condom which contains the deadly virus; so some people actually buy condoms and cut off the very part of the prophylactic which makes it functional. Since these Western public health campaigns have crashed and burned so egregiously, it figures that polygamous young men resort to “traditional” i.e. witch doctor-prescribed methods like drinking snake oils, herbal teas and having unprotected sex with virgins.

So if these billboards are such absolutely ineffective pieces of garbage, why on Earth do humanitarian aid organizations waste their money on them? Part of the reason is surely that some of the individuals implementing these humanitarian aid campaigns simply don’t get it. But these professional aid-givers with their Ivy League graduate degrees are generally intelligent people – I can’t imagine that all of them are so dense that they don’t understand the folly of expressing public health messages with the written word in a thoroughly illiterate culture.

A more rational explanation for this embarrassing waste might be that Foreign Service Officers and professional development agents are often so lazy that they can’t be bothered to learn the local tribal language(s) of the culture they’re working in – the vernacular tongues without which they can’t possibly engage in any meaningful health education campaign. But they need to demonstrate to their superiors that they did something, anything constructive with their time in Namibia other than gallivanting around on the taxpayers’ dime. Constructing 100 undecipherable billboards – though they might be utterly useless for the Namibian people – at least makes for a solid bullet point on a professional aid-giver’s résumé.

But an even more rational explanation might lie in the political/economic interests of the rent-seeking aid agencies, private aid contractors and NGOs themselves. The unfortunate metric by which they all measure success is not the number of HIV infections averted or the number of Africans educated but the sheer volume of funds dispersed – the more money they spend, the more “successful” they can claim to be; e.g. “This year we spent $100,000 on a campaign to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS”. It doesn’t matter if that $100,000 was spent on a particularly ineffective awareness-raising campaign, or if it didn’t reap any positive health-related results. All that matters on the bottom line is how much money they spent, because the more funds they spend one year, they more funds they can justify raising from donor agencies, banks and private donors the next year.

So do I think that we – the vanguard of humanity who genuinely care about alleviating the disease and misery which defines life in so much of the world – should just give up on teaching Africans about HIV and AIDS? Not at all. I just think that we should stop throwing our money away on such unforgivably stupid wastes of finite resources as visual media which Westerners will never be able to produce for the consumption of peoples who do not understand our system of symbols and imagery, who cannot read our language, who cannot read any language at all – not even their own.

After spending two years living amongst the Minianka tribe in Mali, one lesson I came to understand is that though a literate culture remains alien to these people that have only begun to enjoy access to books, pens and paper, the Miniankas do have a rich and vibrant oral culture. This is a culture in which farmers will dispatch their child from one village to another to rely a simple message, in which virtually all business is transacted through oral contracts, the theology of the Qur’an is disseminated from the mouth of the imam to the ears of the faithful, and where griot troubadours transmit the tribal history from one generation to another through song. If you want to get a message across in the Minianka culture, the only appropriate medium for doing so is the spoken word.

Likewise, you can’t possibly hope to impart unto the Miniankas any useful lessons about health and hygiene unless you speak Minianka. This is one area in which I believe that the Peace Corps is leaps and bounds beyond any other development agencies and NGOs in the field because we are the only organization which bothers to learn the local tribal languages and live out in the field where we can practice them to fluency. I myself did not spend a whole lot of time disseminating seeds of knowledge about HIV/AIDS – I was much more preoccupied with the more ubiquitous scourges of diarrhea, giardia and dysentery. And it took me untold months of building up my language skills, sitting around the teapot chatting with the locals, gradually gaining their trust until I could convince anyone to take even the most modest steps to treat their drinking water.

Teaching the Miniankas about HIV/AIDS is a whole lot trickier because you have to have an exceptional command of the local tongue before you can gracefully converse with the locals about their most intimate relations. And even though my language skills might have been good enough by the end of my two years, I would have never become comfortable enough to talk to conservative Muslim Minianka women about their vaginas. The only people in Sanadougou with whom I could converse about matters of the nether-regions were the teenage-to-twenty-something boys who couldn’t stop asking me about penises, vaginas, and the various other instruments with which Americans engage in sexual relations.

“So Madu, how do Americans do it? Y’know, putting the penis into the vagina?” (Amadou demonstrates by inserting his index finger in and out of a curled fist)

“Well, in America the men have to always wear a condom on our penises before we engage in any sort of hanky-panky. You have to wear a condom every single time – unless, of course, you and your wife are married, you have a lucrative career, a good health insurance plan and enough funds in your savings account to have a baby.”

“But I do not want to wear a condom on my penis. It is not natural!”

“In America you would not have a choice. You must wear a condom on your penis every time you have sex. If you have sex with anyone and you don’t wear a condom – even just once - then everyone will think that you might have AIDS and no one will want to have sex with you ever again.”

“But I am a good Muslim! American women should trust me that I do not have AIDS.”

“Just about every American woman whom you will ever meet in Africa is here to work on HIV/AIDS projects. Hate to break it to you, Amadou, but you live in Africa. You are an African. If you have ever had sex without a condom, and you are open and honest with an American woman about your sexual history, then you have zero chance of ever having sex with her.”

“Hm… maybe I should start wearing condoms - that way I could convince an American woman to sleep with me!”

“That's awful, Amadou. I have just lost a lot of respect for you as a human being. But you know what? There's no such thing as a bad reason to start wear condoms!”

In such a fashion, development agencies and NGOs should make greater efforts to utilize the mass media potential of radio and television – media which are lapped up readily by even the most illiterate Minianka. This is a culture in which an entire village will sit around the car battery-powered TV set watching the soap commercials as raptly as their dubbed Telemundo soap operas. If there is ever to be a cost-effective means to encourage Africans to practice safe sex, it would be stop selling them prophylactics the way we sell them rheumatism ointment and arthritis palliatives and to start selling them prophylactics the way we sell them beer, soda and powdered milk – by insinuating that this product will help the consumer to get laid. After all, this is how Trojan and Durex market condoms in the developed West – it’s absolutely bizarre that the one product that should be sold with sex appeal isn’t marketed in Africa as a catalyst for more frequent and more enjoyable sex.

So if there is one thing that we Tubabs should be doing in Africa to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS, I would say it would be to start aggressively marketing condoms to Africans. USAID and the World Bank should start underwriting the filming of commercials with Akon, Jay-Z and the entire Ghanaian soccer team making culture-sensitive advertisements for these wonderfully cost-effective products, perhaps even buying advertising time on the various African radio TV stations. Such a marketing strategy might be aiming for the lowest common denominator, it might be completely bereft of science, and it might not be as intellectually sound as a bona fide public health announcement. And free market fundamentalists might shudder at public subsidies to benefit certain for-profit corportions. But in consequentialist terms I can’t help but think that it would be the most cost-effective strategy to encourage Africans to practice safe and hygienic sex.

Mason Siblings Rock the Local Press

2011-04-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

My lovely sister Emily Mason and I recently graced the front page of this week’s issue of the Lewisboro Ledger.

I want to clarify one point erroneously portrayed in this article; when I realized that the Mayor’s Office of my town in Mali had grossly neglected the maintenance and operations of the municipal solar pump > tap system, and that the population was largely uninterested in buying chlorine to adequately treat their drinking water, I switched gears and focused on the management of sewage and wastewater. Nevertheless, at the very end of my service I was able to prod the Water Committee to reorganize the management of Sanadougou's solar pump > tap system, and we were in fact able to fix the broken handles, main pipes and the livestock-feeding trough.

Fittingly enough this article was juxtaposed with a story on the Town of Lewisboro’s new septic tank ordinances! As you can see, Operation Sphincter Plug has been continuing amongst my own villagers! Huzzah!

Do We Have a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Civilians in Côte d’Ivoire?

2011-04-03T19:09:00.000-07:00

(WARNING: This blog post contains graphic images of war crimes. If you are upset by images of dead bodies then do not continue.)

A dictator stands in defiance of the will of his people. His security forces are shooting nonviolent demonstrators, and a full-fledged civil war has erupted between popular militias and regiments loyal to the incumbent regime. The civilian population is caught in the crosshairs, and the dictator’s paramilitary death squads and mercenaries have resorted to the indiscriminate slaughter of neighborhoods, cities and clans suspected of subversion. An entire nation sits precariously on the brink of genocide. Millions of civilian men, women and children have fled from the violence to become a long term caste of internally-displaced persons and war refugees, destabilizing every country in the region. The people can only pray for the international community to take a stand to protect them from annihilation.

I’m not talking about Libya, however, but another country whose fate might have even greater implications for the fate of African democracy: the Ivory Coast.

Any proponent of this democratic tide which has swept away dictatorships in North Africa should be equally if not more enthusiastic for the ouster of Laurent Gbagbo - the president/dictator of Côte d’Ivoire since 2000. When his term ended in 2005, Gbagbo simply declined to hold new elections and ensconced in the presidential palace for another five years as an unelected warlord. In Gbagbo we have not a long-standing monarch or military leader who is merely facing a sudden popular revolt, but a strongman who had stolen a position of authority by subverting his country’s inchoate democratic institutions.

Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo agreed to hold a presidential election in November 2010. According to all objective observers, former Prime Minister and IMF economist Alassane Ouattara won with an unambiguous plurality of 54 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, the Gbagbo-appointed Constitutional Council declared “widespread fraud” in the pro-Ouattara northern provinces and rejected all of those districts’ ballots - disenfranchising enough voters to certify Gbagbo the winner with an alleged 51 percent of the vote. Gbagbo’s nullification of the Ivorian presidential election was the world’s greatest bastardization of the franchise in recent memory; fittingly, the incumbent nonsensically claiming victory in defiance of all objectively verifiable truth had campaigned on the slogan “We win or we win”.

Moreover, as President of Côte d’Ivoire Gbagbo provoked the Ivorian population into civil war, pitted his Christian-majority South against the Muslims of the North, incited xenophobic violence against French expatriates and immigrant workers from Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali. Since the November election, ex-president Gbagbo widened the category of enemies of his quasi spiritual-nationalist-chauvinist regime and effectively declared war on the Ivorian civilian population which rejected him at the polls - a clear majority of the electorate. Ivorian soldiers and pro-Gbagbo youth gangs have terrorized tribes, clans, villages and neighborhoods as collective punishment for marking their ballots for Ouattara.

The moral cravenness of the Gbagbo regime was best exhibited this past March when the market women of the Abobo neighborhood in Abidjan demonstrated for an end to the fighting, carrying tree branches and chanting "We want peace".

Gbagbo’s forces mowed them down with machine guns, killing eight.

Despite the fact that they have declared allegiance to the rightful President Ouattara, lovers of liberty should hold little sympathy for Les Forces Nouvelles who are swiftly descending from their northern territories to conquer Gbagbo’s strongholds in the South. Les Forces Nouvelles are for the most part jackbooted thugs who likewise govern their territory through extortion, intimidation and outright theft.

Credible reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented an FN modus operandi of arbitrary detentions, torture, extrajudicial killings and sexual violence directed towards those tribes, clans and villages accused of loyalty towards the Gbagbo junta. Aid groups descending upon the western town of Duékué recently “liberated” by the FN have discovered mass graves and piles of bodies which may turn out to evince more than 1,000 individual war crimes.

The Ivorian civilian population needs protection from both factions in this gruesome war. The apathy of the international community in respect to the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire is disgraceful, especially considering the fact that the United Nations already has a peacekeeping force of 9,000 mostly French and Bangladeshi personnel in this country. UN peacekeepers have been stationed in Côte d’Ivoire since 2004, in fact. However, the UNOCI peacekeeping forces effectively only serve to stabilize the expatriate neighborhoods of Abidjan and the environs immediately surrounding Le Golf Hôtel where Ouattara’s government-in-internal-exile has stood under siege since November. Like the UN peacekeeping forces which could only stand their ground and watch as genocide unfolded in Rwanda and Sudan, the powers that be have apparently destined UNOCI to serve as a mere witness to the human slaughter in Côte d’Ivoire.

The United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) is authorized by Resolution 1528, which was passed unanimously in the Security Council back in 2004 and reauthorized and augmented in a series of subsequent resolutions. UNSCR 1528 which begat UNOCI is actually remarkably similar to UNSCR 1973 which brought us the present Operation Odyssey Dawn; each was ostensibly crafted on the liberal humanitarian and politically neutral rationale of maintaining a cease-fire and protecting civilians.

One major difference is that UNSCR 1973 authorized member states to enforce a no-fly zone to protect the Libyan rebels and civilians from assault by the Libyan Air Force; though the Gbagbo has used the Ivorian Air Force to pummel FN positions and civilian targets, and in 2004 even attacked the French air base in Bouaké (killing nine French soldiers and an American aid worker), the mandate for UNOCI has never included the enforcement a no-fly zone. Understandably so; most of the war crimes conducted by both sides in the Ivorian Civil War have been implemented by foot soldiers.

Another major difference – arguably more subtle but a more consequential difference nonetheless – is that UNSCR 1973 authorized member states to enforce the transport of arms in and out of Libya, and a significant portion of participants in Operation Odyssey Dawn have actively deployed their respective navies to hold up the blockade and starve Qaddafi of arms. UNSCR 1528 and its follow-up resolutions similarly exhorted member states to enforce an arms embargo on Côte d’Ivoire as well, but no one has seemed to notice. Even since the post-electoral revival of hostilities, UN investigators have been pursuing reports that guns, ammunition, perhaps even attack helicopters and aircraft may have been imported from Zimbabwe, Angola, even landlocked Belarus. Though some of the individual accusations may turn out to have be groundless – apparently the Belarussian helicopter sale had indeed been planned but never actually executed – the fact that Ivorian seaports and airports have been open to commercial traffic at all is testament to the fact that no relevant powers of the international community are earnestly committed to enforcing the arms embargo which is crucial to minimizing the extent of the Ivorian bloodbath.

Conversely, the UN-authorized operations in Libya are extremely dissimilar from UNOCI in that whereas Obama, Sarkozy, Cameron and every other power player has repeatedly insisted that Odyssey Dawn will not entail the deployment of ground troops, the multilateral campaign is being conducted exclusively by air and sea, the peacekeeping mission in Côte d’Ivoire consists almost exclusively of ground troops. UNOCI now consists of 9,024 uniformed personnel on the ground, including 7,578 troops, 176 military observers and 1,270 police – disproportionately Bangladeshi infantry and French gendarmes. Boots on the ground do not necessarily make the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire any more effective; they have been by and large limited in their conduct to securing President Ouattara and his coterie at Le Golf Hôtel and only the most modest of civilian protection operations in Abidjan.

The crippling reserve exercised by UNOCI is likewise based on the exponentially greater risk of protecting civilians via ground troops; to date, 54 UN personnel have been killed in the line of duty in Côte d’Ivoire – more than the total death toll of US personnel in Bosnia, Kosovo, Colombia and Haiti combined. As the Obama administration is preoccupied with extricating our land forces from the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are reasonably squeamish about committing to any sort of civilian protection operations that cannot be executed by B-2 stealth bombers or guided-missile destroyers.

It seems that the logistics of peacekeeping in Côte d’Ivoire might be daunting, even more so than our “kinetic military action” in Libya. Yet it seems that the moral logic of intervention is in both countries is indistinguishable. President Obama intones that action was necessitated by the specter of full-out massacre in Benghazi – an action which “would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world”. Indeed it would have. But are our consciences not stained by the massacres in Abobo and Duékué?

Obama argues that the United States has a strategic interest in preventing a massacre which “would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous trains on the peaceful – yet fragile – transitions in Egypt and Tunisia.” At last count, the UN High Commissioner of Refugees stated that at least 116,000 Ivorian refugees had already fled to neighboring Liberia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea – with more than 100,000 in Liberia alone. All of these countries are already suffering from some degree of political instability, anemic economies and intolerably high levels of unemployment; hence the situation we have now with multiple millions of internally displaced Ivorians who might very well pour over the borders bodes terribly ill for West Africa’s fragile democracies.

Obama contends that if the U.S. did not intervene in Libya, “The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power.” Though as Laurent Gbagbo defied the will of his people and nullified the election in which he lost, we demonstrated to the young democracies of Africa that we would respond to their power grabs with sharply-worded proclamations and economic sanctions that we would not bother to enforce. This year alone presidential elections are scheduled to be held in Liberia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, and seven other countries on the continent; is the lesson of Ggbagbo to be learned by African incumbents that they should do well to stay in power by not holding elections at all?

Moreover, Obama maintained that intervention in Libya was necessary to uphold the credibility of the UN itself, that had we not acted “The writ of the United Nations Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling that institution’s future credibility to uphold global peace and security.” How does United Nations make itself credible when the Security Council calls for a cease-fire and does not enforce it? Or when the Security Council enacts an arms embargo on a war criminal regime – but not a single member state is willing to interdict cargo ships and planes bound for it? How can any institution be trusted to keep the peace in the African heartland when its peacekeeping mission cowers on the beaches of Abidjan?

In all fairness, the newly-christened Obama Doctrine is more nuanced than a mere postulate of normative ethics; the rubric for intervention laid out in the President’s “Responsibility to Act” speech is a complex calculus of moral imperatives and cold cost-benefit analysis. And he did state quite clearly: “It’s true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs”; i.e. sometimes despots will crush their people and the United States will do nothing because – however righteous intervention might be – we cannot afford to intervene, or we can but the fate of the country in question is not in our core national interests.

And likewise, it looks quite manifest that the international community is not going to take any substantive action to protect the Ivorian civilian population, that this civil war is probably going to end within a matter of hours as the Les Forces Nouvelles seize hold of the last military bases and police stations in Abidjan, the television station and the presidential palace, the last Gbagbo loyalists either defect, surrender or are summarily executed by the victors. Laurent Gbagbo himself will most likely come to an end with a bullet to the temple. And one can only imagine what sort of “revolutionary justice” the FN Jacobins might mete out to the neighborhoods, villages, and clans which voted for Gbagbo. This sort of African solution to an African problem will not put the lives of any U.S. troops on the line and it won’t cost taxpayers a dime; from our narrow self-interest, it might even be an efficient policy of isolationism. Though for the Ivorian people, on the other hand, it might mean tens of thousands of civilian deaths which could have been completely prevented had the international community made a serious stab at intervention.

As we bask in the self-righteousness of pre-empting humanitarian calamity in Libya, how do we sit content with the knowledge that civilians are being massacred at this very moment, that the United States could very well lead a multilateral coalition to protect the Ivorian civilian population – but we politely declined? How might our academies’ mightiest metaphysicists and international human rights lawyers conclude a moral “responsibility to protect” civilians in Libya – but not civilians in Côte d’Ivoire? What makes a real, actual massacre in Duékué any less atrocious than a hypothetical massacre in Benghazi? Is it the fact that Libyans are Caucasoid enough that they almost resemble Europeans – but Ivorians are much darker-skinned Others? Or is it that the Western economies cannot handle even a mild oil shortage – but we can cope with civil war in countries whose greatest export is the cocoa bean?

This author for one sympathizes greatly with the doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” which is evolving out of the legal framework of Odyssey Dawn, but a legal doctrine which aims to uphold the values of universal human rights either necessitates intervention to protect both peoples or neither. If the power elite espouse a “responsibility to protect” the people of Libya, but find no such obligation to intervene on behalf of the Ivorians, their reasoning must be predicated on some combination of apathy, hypocrisy, or the kind of cold-blooded economics in which human costs merit no consideration.

The Elusive Aim for Regime Change in UNSCR 1973

2011-03-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

Just as any thinking person cannot help but identify with the demonstrators for constitutionalism and parliamentary self-government everywhere throughout our Arab Spring, this lover of liberty empathizes with the Libyan rebels who wish to oust the bizarre, sadistic one-man revolution of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. I would have preferred to have seen Qaddafi go relatively peacefully like Ben Ali and Mubarak, I would have preferred to see the Libyan insurrectionists overthrow their tyrannical regime with their own hands. Obviously neither of those scenarios were fated to be, and now apparently the only way to prevent the massacre of rebel forces and Libyan civilians by the Qaddafi loyalists is with some form of foreign military intervention.

The legal internationalist should have been opposed to unilateral U.S. intervention in Libya without a casus belli of self-defense, without authorization by the United Nations as it would have been a violation of international law. Likewise, I would have registered my doubts if France, Britain, or the Arab League were to intervene under such terms. However, now that the Security Council has just passed UNSCR 1973, concerns about illegal warfare should be largely assuaged. So long as the U.S. or any other foreign country wishes to intervene in Libya in accordance with the U.N. mandate, the matter of a no-fly zone is no longer a debate of de jure legality but one of normative politics and logistics. As the U.S. Air Force and Navy intervene, the objective rationalist should hope that they can get the job done with as few casualties and with as little cost as possible. The question remains though; what precisely does this job entail?

Now that the U.N. mission in Libya is a reality, cheerleaders of military intervention would be wise to temper their populist fervor by carefully reading the exact text of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. UNSCR 1973 is the follow-up to UNSCR 1970 passed on February 26th which

1) referred the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court for investigations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide;

2) instituted an embargo of arms transfers to Libya, Libyan arms exports, and the movement of mercenaries to fight in Libya;

3) imposed travel bans 17 Jamahiriyah figures and enacted asset freezes on Colonel Qaddafi and his sons;

4) called on U.N. members states to contribute humanitarian assistance to Libyan civilians.

As far as U.N. sanctions go, even the preliminary USCR 1970 was just about as strong as they come; it essentially revived the bulk of the U.N. sanctions imposed on Libya in UNSCR 748 (1992) and 883 (1993) in the wake of Tripoli’s sponsorship of the Lockerbie bombing and eventually eased from 1998 to 2003.

UNSCR 1973 tightens the screws on Qaddafi a bit further. The Resolution contains a range of operative clauses which authorize limited foreign intervention operations – with the politically neutral, strictly humanitarian objective of reducing civilian casualties. With 1973, the Security Council…

1. “Demands the immediate establishment of a cease-fire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians”...

2. Authorizes Member States “to take all necessary measures”… “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory…”

6. “Decides to establish a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in order to protect civilians”... (i.e. flights with a military purpose, explicitly excepting flights with humanitarian passengers or cargo)

8. “Authorizes Member States… to take all necessary measures to enforce compliance with the ban on flights…”9. Calls upon Member States to provide assistance with the implementation of the no-fly zone and protection of civilian populations, including the use of air bases and airspace

13. Calls upon Member States “to ensure strict implementation of the arms embargo” established in UNSCR 1970 by inspecting vessels and aircraft in their seaports, airports and territorial waters bound to or from the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

16. Calls upon Member States to take action to enforce UNSCR 1970’s ban on the import of mercenaries from their own respective populations or traveling through their territories bound for Libya

17 and 18. ...and to enforce the air embargo on the Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah

UNSCR 1973 calls for enforcement mechanisms of the arms embargo, mercenary embargo, air embargo and financial sanctions previously laid out in UNSCR 1970. UNSCR 1973 strengthens the Security Council’s prior ultimatums to Libya with demands for a cease-fire. And most dramatically, UNSCR 1973 includes a mandate for foreign military intervention, calling for U.N. Member States “take all necessary measures” “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” and to enforce the no-fly zone. Period.

This resolution authorizes an agenda which should satisfy the self-ascribed humanitarian interventionists whose objective begins and ends at the prevention of civilian casualties. The no-fly zone applies to the Qaddafi loyalists as well as the Benghazi rebels alike – technically. But obviously it was intended to be enforced against the only faction in the Libyan Civil War which is employing Air Force bombers and heavy artillery against civilian populations. UNSCR 1973 was quite patently constructed for enforcement against only one side to the dispute, and it would be a fair bet to assume that there will be little to no incidence of coalition air strikes against Libyan rebels who might be in violation of the so-called cease-fire.

Though this Resolution might yet tilt the civil war in the rebels’ favor, let’s not get carried away to think that the Security Council has just authorized regime change in Tripoli. UNSCR 1973 does not authorize Member States to take action against Libyan military targets unrelated to the enforcement of a cease-fire, the implementation of the no-fly zone or the protection of civilians. It does not authorize France to bomb Libyan Army barracks full of soldiers engaged in calisthenics training. It does not authorize Britain to provide air cover for a rebel offensive on loyalist-held territory; it does not allow anyone to fight the Benghazi rebels’ civil war for them. Just as the George H.W. Bush administration refrained from marching onto Baghdad as such a move would have exceeded Operation Desert Storm’s narrow U.N. mandate to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the coalition amassing to intervene in Libya cannot legally expand its objective to regime change in Tripoli.

Yet for some reason (perhaps these same Neoconservative interventionists’ dissatisfaction with the outcome of the first Gulf War) I don’t think that the present day Libya hawks would sit content with an endgame that leaves Colonel Qaddafi in power.

John McCain – one of the first major outspoken proponents of a no-fly zone – makes no bones about its final cause: “If you want Qaddafi to go, then one of the steps – among many – would be to establish a no-fly zone…”

Joe Lieberman conflates the objective of preventing civilian casualties with supporting the rebels and regime change:

“The president has made clear that Gadhafi’s got to go; he’s no longer the legitimate leader of Libya, and the question is what are we going to do to help make sure that Gadhafi goes as quickly as possible because the danger here is that this is going to become a bloody stalemate, a civil war, a bloody civil war...”

Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz calls for not just a no-fly zone in Libya, but for the U.S. to recognize the National Council in Benghazi as the legitimate government of Libya, providing the rebels with arms, supplies and direct military intervention:

Recognizing the new National Council would affect the psychology of both Gadhafi's cronies and his brave opponents. Ending the mixed signals sent by U.S. hesitation over recognition would end any possibility of rehabilitating Gadhafi if he wins. Absurd as that may sound to us—particularly after President Obama has declared that Gadhafi must go—this is probably the outcome that Gadhafi's cronies hope for, and that his opponents most fear.

David Frum – who wrote some of the Bush administration’s seminal speeches on regime change in Iraq and who himself laid the case for regime change in Iran and Syria – draws the argument for intervention directly to the need to oust the Libyan government:

“Gadhafi’s departure from power in other words is not just a requirement of humanity and decency. It’s not only justice to the people of Libya. It is also essential to American credibility and the stability of the Middle East region.”

My intent in harping upon this point is not to draw a straw man argument but to elucidate the U.S. Libya hawks’ intentions. It seems that there are two camps in this present discourse who have been clamoring for a no-fly zone. The first camp would be the liberal humanitarians who are concerned exclusively with the prevention of civilian casualties, who could be content with the Libyan rebels putting down their arms and the partition of Libya into a provisional rebel territory based in Benghazi and a Qaddafi rump state in Tripoli. The second faction for a no-fly zone is that of the Neoconservative hawks who embrace the language and purported objectives of the liberal humanitarians but make it clear that they do intend for the U.S. to take sides in this conflict, and that a no-fly zone is only the preliminary action that ought to be taken as part of a larger campaign to oust Qaddafi. This is notable because UNSCR 1973 explicitly only authorizes foreign military intervention to attain the goals of the liberal humanitarians, and the broader goals of regime change and democratization in the Arab world which the Neocons espouse – as desirable as they might be – go far beyond the scope of the U.N. mandate.

As for yours truly, I could not help but empathize with the Wolfowitz, McCain, et al.’s dream of establishing constitutional monarchies, republican and parliamentary regimes which derive their moral authority to lead from the popular will from Kabul to Baghdad to Tripoli. I agree with the liberal sentiment that the blossoming of democracy and free markets in repressed authoritarian societies should sow the seeds for peaceful change and political moderation, that the demise of states like Qaddafi’s nightmarish Jamahiriyah should lead to the stabilization of the region, undercut the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism and reduce the threat of anti-American terrorism in the long run. And by the way, regime change in Tarabulus is what a good plurality the Libyan people apparently want – it is certainly a desirable end. Regardless, there is no way to read the relevant documents of international law (namely the United Nations Charter, UNSCR 1970 and UNSCR 1973) and conclude that signatory U.N.O. Member States such as the U.S. can simply declare war on Libya and overthrow Colonel Qaddafi on a whim.

It would be perfectly plausible for the Obama administration to heed Wolfowitz’s advice and follow the lead of France and Portugal in recognizing the National Council in Benghazi as the legitimate government of Libya. Such a move would allow the administration to abide by myriad U.S. restrictions on military and economic aid to the Benghazi regime – though it would not make it any easier for the U.S. to exercise decisive force on Tripoli to bring a quick end to the Qaddafi regime. So long as the United Nations recognizes the Jamahiriyah as the legitimate government of Libya and Muammar el-Qaddafi as its legitimate ruler, the United Nations Charter stands in the way of a legal NATO-Arab League operation to subvert the Tripoli regime.

Though imagine if the following events – all perfectly plausible – were to precipitate in New York, Cairo and Benghazi over the course of this week:

1) After recommendation from the Security Council, the Arab League and the African Union member states were to sponsor a General Assembly resolution calling for the expulsion of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah from the U.N.O. – which they can do according to Chapter II, Article 6 of the United Nations Charter. It passes.

2. Those same Arab League, African Union countries sponsor a second General Assembly resolution calling for the recognition of the National Council in Benghazi as the legitimate government of Libya. It too passes.

3) The newly-recognized Libyan government in Benghazi were to appoint a new Ambassador to the U.N. (perhaps Mohammad Shaghash, the Ambassador who recently defected from Tripoli)

There is something of a precedent for this. The Republic of China led by Chiang Kai-Shek joined the United Nations Organization as one of its founding members in 1945, the U.N. continued to recognize the R.O.C. governmentin Taiwan as the rightful representatives of all of China until 1971. By that time when the Chinese Civil War had been long settled in favor of Mao Tse-tung and his Red Army, the General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, which concluded:

"the representatives of the Government of the People's Republic of China are the only lawful representatives of China to the United Nations and that the People's Republic of China is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council,"

Furthemore, the General Assembly decided:

"to restore all its rights to the People's Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-Shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it.”

UNGAR 2758 effectively stripped the R.O.C. from membership in the U.N.O. and transferred its General Assembly and permanent Security Council seats to the People’s Republic of China.

If the General Assembly were to expel the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah from the U.N.O. and replaced with representatives of the regime in Benghazi, as far as international law goes, we’d be talking about a whole new ballpark. If the provisional government in Benghazi is recognized by the U.N. as the legitimate government of all of Libya, Qaddafi’s armies would then be just another non-state militant group with no legal standing akin to the I.R.A., P.L.O., the Janjaweed, etc. which Tripoli propped up at one time in the past. Perhaps the Qaddafi-loyalist Libyan Army, Libyan Navy and Libyan Air Force could even be classified as terrorist organizations (as the U.S. now classifies the Iranian Revolutionary Guards) and thus any government aiding or abetting them financially or otherwise could be designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism…

If – under such circumstances – the Libyan Ambassador to the U.N. were to call upon the aid of fellow Member States to come to his nation’s protection, there would be very little in the wide corpus of international law standing in our way to shower Benghazi with guns, ammunition, tanks and artillery. The legitimate Libyan government could call upon U.N., Arab League and African Union member-states to come to its aid against an existential threat just like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait did in 1990. A joint NATO-Arab League-African Union coalition could perfectly legally and with the fully nationalist legitimacy of the pan-Arabist, pan-Africanist regional organization defend the rightful Libyan government in Benghazi and help them to quash the “rebellion” in the Tripolitania.

Nevertheless, now that a truly multilateral military intervention in Libya has explicit Security Council authorization and de jure legality, this blogger is still concerned about the doctrinal repercussions. Yes we can intervene, but why ought we intervene in Libya? Is it because the international community has an obligation to strike against states in order to prevent gross human rights abuses and crimes against humanity? If that is the case, what makes the atrocities in Libya worthy of a U.N.-enforced no-fly zone – but not the atrocities in Darfur or the Gaza Strip? Let’s suppose that the people of Bahrain and Yemen were to call upon the U.N. to send peacekeeping forces to protect their nonviolent demonstrations from being massacred by their own totalitarian states – under what doctrine of protecting civilians must the U.N. intervene in Libya but not Bahrain and Yemen?

The established doctrines of military intervention might need some significant revision in the wake of newly-christened Operation Odyssey Dawn – especially if the Obama administration were to heed the advice of Wolfowitz, Lieberman, et al. and wholeheartedly take the side of the Benghazi rebels in the Libyan Civil War. The U.S. has conducted regime change under the ostensible rationales of containing thwart Communist aggression and preventing state-sponsored terrorist attacks. Though in this circumstance there isn’t the slightest pretense of intervening in order to prevent acts of aggression against American national security interests. G.A. Resolution 2785 only recognized the outcome of the Chinese Civil War 22 years after the fact. Is the United States now obligated to intervene in every single conflict between an undemocratic regime and a popular movement opposed to it and to always side with the latter? Is the Arab League, the African Union, NATO and United Nations? Or are we only obligated to take sides in civil wars against dictators like Qaddafi whom we have always disliked?

If the Obama administration were to invoke the international law of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, exert our political sway before the General Assembly and Security Council, exercise the power of the United States Armed Forces and our treaty alliances in order to replace Qaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya with some form of constitutional self-government, we would be entering a brave new doctrinal tomorrow. Would the United States be henceforth bound to some sort of Obama Doctrine which extends the Monroe Doctrine all the way to the Sahara Desert and establishes a universal doctrine for the United States to intervene on behalf of every popular movement in Africa and the Middle East? If we were to back the National Council in Benghazi to subvert Qaddafi’s dictatorship in Tripoli, we would be establishing a foreign policy more Wilsonian than anything Woodrow Wilson could have fantasized, a foreign policy which would interpret the promise of the Declaration of Independence as an affirmation of global human rights including a right to government by multiparty elections and the right of revolution against undemocratic regimes? Personally, I don’t think that sounds half bad…

However, if the Obama Doctrine formulated to justify intervention in Libya is going to have any moral bearing this precedent for intervention must be applicable to other comparable cases. If the impending humanitarian catastrophe in Benghazi is sufficient reason for the international community to take a forceful stand against the war criminal regime in Libya, then we must go through the Security Council to intervene on behalf of the people of Côte d’Ivoire, Zimbabwe, Guinea, the Congo, Sudan and Eritrea against their respective war criminal regimes. On the other hand, if the doctrinal precedent is meant to be “limited to the present circumstances”, inapplicable to any future cases because our interests are not threatened by these police states’ genocides and political massacres, then it would demonstrate that our principles of intervention are either nonexistent or false. Libya could only be a singularity designated for regime change if the capacity of unmitigated evil were limited to the persona of Muammar al-Qaddafi. If the millions of victims of Robert Mugabe, Laurent Gbagbo and Omar Hassan al-Bashir are deemed somehow less worthy of our intervention than the thousands of victims of Colonel Qaddafi, our inaction would prove ipse facto that the liberal case for intervention in Libya is just a humanitarian fig leaf for our discomforting, venal interests in the makeup of the Libyan regime; U.S. hegemony over North Africa and the petroleum which lies beneath her sands.

The Most Fabulous Way to Stimulate the Economy

2011-03-06T18:04:00.000-08:00

What would you say if I told you that New York State lawmakers could amend a certain legal regulation in a way that would stimulate additional consumer spending, foster more sales opportunities for small businesses and create thousands of new jobs? What if I told you that this policy would not add a dime to the deficit; in fact, all of the sales tax on the resultant commerce, additional income tax revenue and processing fees for these new contracts would actually help state and local governments balance their budgets? According to any credible economic analysis, this policy would only foster business growth so benign that it is almost inconceivable that it could lead to negative externalities in health, the environment, culture or anything at all.

What is this miracle policy of which I speak? What could possibly put some spring into the step of this dreary, moribund economy? Well, when people think of ways for the government to prime the pump, they usually imagine burly construction workers re-paving the highway. But we should also think of the police officer who got to keep his job thanks to the Recovery Act, the sailor who is bravely serving his country in the US Navy, and also the cowboy, the Native American and the motorcycling leather daddy…

This economic miracle policy I’m talking about, of course, is legalizing same-sex marriage. Nowadays even those with money to spare are so afraid of the market that they are just sitting on it in the bank; but if there’s ever a time to splurge, wouldn’t it be when your daughter has fallen madly in love with the perfect woman and you want to give her the wedding of her dreams? ...and if your son wanted to marry someone else’s son, wouldn’t you do the same? Some people have been waiting to be able to do this their entire lives.

In this time of economic crisis let’s forget for a moment about the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the sexual ethics expounded by the Book of Leviticus and think about marriage solely in terms of dollars and cents. The average wedding in New York State costs around $32,000 – but in New York City where all goods and services are more expensive the figure is nearer to $37,000. However, the average wedding ceremony between two men or two women in New York State will most likely cost significantly less – circa $27,000 – largely due to the facts that 1) same-sex couples are less likely to receive support from their parents to pay for their weddings; and 2) same sex couples are more likely than opposite-sex couples to opt for no-frills City Hall marriages.

But even with the most conservative estimate that accepts continued social discrimination as a given, each and every additional marriage will nonetheless serve as a micro-level stimulus package. If the New York state legislature were to act this spring to modernize our discriminatory marriage laws, then the summer and autumn of 2011 could be punctuated by tens of thousands of additional weddings and a wave of additional commerce from Montauk to Buffalo.

At the very least, marriage equality would trim the budget deficit by adding revenues. For all of those couples who simply want to get it over with and get a City Hall marriage, in New York City it will cost them $35 for a marriage license payable to the Office of the City Clerk. Everyone who lives outside the five boroughs who wants to have a marriage certificate will have to make a credit card deduction, money order or write a $30 check payable to the New York State Department of Public Health, they will also have to pay for a $7.25 vendor processing fee, $15 for priority mail postage, and if they opt for next-day shipping the married couple would pay for an additional UPS fee of $12. With every marriage license issued, New York State would receive a bit more revenue to help mitigate our $10 billion budget shortfall.

Though it would be fair to say that a fair number of New York’s gays and lesbians and bisexuals and transsexuals would probably go for something more extravagant than a mere City Hall wedding… Seriously, if you’ve ever attended a Long Island bat mitzvah, just imagine how opulent Long Island gay marriages will be! Legalizing same-sex marriage will open the floodgates to the greatest, gayest shopping spree that New York has ever seen!

For starters, marriage usually starts with a proposal – and an engagement ring usually costs around $3,125. Jewelers will be so inundated with orders that there would be increased demand for every precious gem on the market – as well as the labor of goldsmiths, silversmiths and diamond cutters. Though the Hasidic diamond dealers of 47th Street might be amongst the most vociferous opponents of marriage equality, they would be amongst the greatest financial beneficiaries!

Then with time most of these same-sex fiancées are going to buy wedding bands and the jewelry industry would surge again (according to The Wedding Report, the average American wedding entails $3,631 of spending on jewelry for the day of the marriage ceremony).

For anything more elaborate, they are going to hire a wedding planner for $1,940…

Wedding announcements, invitations, reply cards and thank-you notes on personalized stationary will cost $1,117…

Your average marrying couple will spend $345 on hair styling, facials, makeup and spa treatment…

The best man or bridesmaid will throw down an average of $2,189 on the bachelor/bachelorette party…

The grooms will spend about $1,858 on their tuxedos…

Or the brides will spend $1,858 on their dresses…

…or the brides will spend $1,858 on their tuxedoes…

…or the grooms will spend about $1,858 on their dresses…

The sartorial possibilities are endless, and any permutation of bow-ties, tiaras, corsets and cummerbunds that the marrying couples, best men, bridesmaids and guests would buy would nevertheless serve as the greatest one-time boon to the high-end fashion industry that New York has ever seen!

Marrying couples typically spend around $2,036 on the ceremony itself; i.e. renting the location, hiring an officiate, paying for an aisle runner, a pillow box and a ketubah, etc…

They will spend an average of $1,276 on flowers and décor…

The big ticket item, however, is almost invariably the wedding reception – which costs an average of $11,863. Can you even imagine how many more job openings would be created for caterers, chefs, waitresses, busboys and bartenders?

More demand would be created for bakers as well, as the brides or grooms spend $469 on each wedding cake…

…$1,244 on limousine and chauffeurs…

… and of course a honeymoon, which usually rings up to a total of $5,027 (though chances are the bulk of this money would stimulate the economy of Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands – not New York)

Subsequent growth in consumer spending would not be confined to the brides and grooms and their families. According to the Association of Bridal Consultants, married couples receive an average of 75 gifts and that the average amount of money spent on each wedding gift is $113. So for every time that a pair of men or a pair of women marry in New York, they will spur their guests to go out and spend approximately $8,475 on gifts that might have otherwise just sat in the bank and accumulated infinitesimal interest.

Out of town wedding guests are going to stay in New York hotels, and even if they are going to stay with friends for the weekend they are probably going to go out with their hosts to a restaurant on Friday night or at least stop at the liquor store and buy them a bottle of wine. No matter how you crunch the numbers, marriage equality is going to encourage people – and especially people from out of state – to go out and spend more of their money on New York goods and services.

Of course, we do not know exactly how many same-sex couples there are living together in New York because the 2010 Census which is still being tabulated was only the first census since Massachusetts’ landmark Goodridge decision in 2004, and this data only counts same-sex couples who are already legally married – thus providing an incomplete picture of how many same-sex couples there are who would be married if New York amended its family law code. So in the absence of more sound Census methodology the best we can do is refer to scientific estimates; according to a study by the Williams Institute, as of 2005 there were approximately 50,854 gay and lesbian couples living together in New York State.

However, that does not mean that legalizing same-sex marriage in New York State would necessarily result in exactly 50,854 weddings. Approximately 43 percent of those couples – 21,867 of them – have already married somewhere else. Since 2005 the population of same-sex couples has certainly risen. And there are of course a good number of couples who would prefer to marry in some other jurisdiction, to simply apply for a domestic partnership, or to not marry at all. The Office of the New York City Comptroller estimates that – based on the experience of Massachusetts – roughly 51 percent of the remaining nubile 28,987 couples would marry over the first three years after marriage equality has been achieved; in other words, around 14,783 New York resident couples would marry. After that initial surge, the rate of same-sex marriages would probably taper off significantly and eventually achieve something close to parity with the rate of opposite-sex marriages. According to the NYC Comptroller, resident weddings would generate almost $110 million in additional consumer spending over those first three years…

…and that’s only taking into consideration New York State residents; based on the experience of other states, the big money maker would be in out-of-state residents who would come from all across the country and all around the world to have their weddings in tolerant and accepting New York. The NYC Comptroller’s Office estimates that in the first three years of marriage equality, more than 56,000 couples would travel from out of state to marry in New York. Keep in mind that New York State law requires a minimum of 24 hours between the issuance of a marriage license and the performance of a wedding ceremony, so out-of-state residents would either have to make two day trips or (much more likely) stay overnight. Even the estimated 6,845 couples from mostly New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut who simply drive across the border for two day trips would bring in an additional $1 million. But those who come all the way from Florida, Texas, Japan or South Korea for destination weddings would spend almost $60 million, their guests would spend another $77 million on transportation, lodging, etc.

When you put it all together; New York residents, cross-border commuters and out of state same-sex marriage tourists would generate an additional $247 million in additional economic activity over the next three years – $175 million in New York City alone. We can only speculate as to how much long-term job creation this boom would generate; most likely, most of the additional business would probably be picked up by already-existing florists, bakers, DJs, etc. Though based on the experience of other states, the legalization of same-sex marriage would probably create a few thousand additional jobs mainly in the labor-intensive hospitality and catering businesses. But the sheer amount of consumer spending and job growth alone does not tell the whole story; for a more clear view of marriage equality’s effect on the public treasury we have to crunch those numbers a bit further.

When economists calculate the value of public policy they use the tool of cost-benefit analysis; and even the most liberal proponent of civil rights must concede that there are economic costs to granting marriage rights to gays and lesbians. Namely, firms that offer spousal and family benefits to their employees would be compelled to extend health care benefits to the spouses of their newly-married employees. The study by the Comptroller’s Office estimates that all of the same-sex married couples with one member working for a firm in New York State would cost their employers an additional $63 million in health insurance costs. However, this causes little reason to fear that businesses would flee to other states with discriminatory marriage laws in order to save on human resources; that $63 million in health benefits would be spread fairly evenly across more than 500,000 firms, unless a given business employs a disproportionate amount of nubile homosexuals then their burden would be comparatively negligible, and most small businesses would not be affected at all. In fact, most Fortune 500 companies located in New York – including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, American Express, Chase, MetLife, Citigroup, Bloomberg LP, Time Warner, Barnes & Noble, Eastman Kodak, to name a few – already offer health benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of their employees.

From the perspective of public finance, marriage equality would not generate any additional health care costs because New York State and City agencies are already required to offer health care benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of public employees. If anything, the public sector would actually save on means-tested programs because many newlywed couples’ combined income or assets would bring them above the income and asset thresholds for many social welfare programs; e.g. the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Safety Net Assistance programs, child care subsidies, earned income tax credits, etc. For a good number of people the legal act of marriage per se serves as a catalyst for movement from the class of welfare recipients to taxpaying contributors to the public treasury.

Following that same line of reasoning, marriage equality would in fact lead to a windfall in public revenues. Marriage licensing application fees – 50,458 applications for $35 in New York City and 32,012 applications for $40 elsewhere in New York State – would total $3 million in additional revenue. Sales taxes on all of the aforementioned wedding expenditures would add $4.3 million to City revenues and another $5.5 million to the State. With all the out of state destination weddings expected to be held in the five boroughs (i.e. Manhattan) the City would also collect an additional $767,000 in Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue. If the New York legislature changed the tax code so that same-sex married couples could file their tax returns jointly, so many couples would incur the so-called “marriage penalty” by moving to a higher income tax bracket that New York State would collect $2.1 million in additional income taxes. So it would be fair to assume that New York City would be able to balance its budget with $5.1 million and New York State would be able to plug its gaping deficit with $10.6 million in additional revenues over the next three years. Perhaps if homeownership rises for married same-sex couples, the government might even take in more revenue from property taxes and related real estate transaction-related taxes (though this is purely speculative); if this is the case, New York’s gaping deficit could be trimmed even further.

For a state to maintain discriminatory marriage laws is to practice fiscal insanity – they’re leaving money on the table. Though what we’re currently doing in New York is even more self-defeating; in 2004, then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer responded to the flurry of gay marriages in Massachusetts, San Francisco and New Paltz by issuing a memorandum stating that New York – though we do not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples – would give full faith and credit to the same-sex marriages issued by other jurisdictions. From the perspective of social justice, this might be a pragmatic step in the right direction, but from the perspective of economics it’s the worst policy imaginable as it assumes all of the costs but reaps very few of the benefits. Suppose there is a lesbian couple from Schenectady composed of a pharmacy worker and her unemployed wife and they decide to get married in Northampton; they might add to the health insurance costs borne by New York businesses, but all of the economic activity and tax revenue generated by their wedding would be enjoyed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In other words, New York is exporting our gay marriage jobs to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa, the District of Columbia, all ten provinces and three territories of Canada, Mexico City, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and South Africa.

Civil unions – another modest half-step towards social justice – are even more limited in their economic stimulus potential. In New Jersey, Illinois, Rhode Island, Delaware and Hawaii where the state issues civil union licenses to same-sex couples, businesses pay ever so slightly more in health insurance costs. But the wedding planners, hoteliers, caterers, florists and diamond cutters of these states have experienced only minimal business growth because hardly anyone throws down $37,000 to celebrate their daughter’s civil union – filing for domestic partnership feels as special as a trip to the DMV.

Likewise, it seems that the only way for a state to reach the maximum fiscal benefit is to establish complete and utter marriage equality under law. When the Comptroller’s Office did its cost-benefit analysis of legalizing same-sex marriages, they calculated that the government of New York State would come out of the red by collecting roughly $8 million in more taxes and saving $100 million on welfare programs, while the City would collect an additional $7 million in taxes and fees and have only negligible fluctuations in spending on anything at all. And though the health insurance costs and the benefits of additional sales will for the most part be paid by different firms, the private sector as a whole would grow on a net basis by $184 million throughout New York State with $142 million of that economic growth in the City.

Marriage equality should also make the New York economy more competitive in the long run by keeping our state among the forefront of social progress. Let’s say that the Acme Widget Company of Des Moines is planning on expanding to the East Coast and has to decide between two potential sites for their new bureau; one in Albany and the other in Hartford. The board of directors might reason that, ceteris paribus, it would be in their best interests to open the new bureau in Hartford because a lot of gay people would prefer to live in a state where they can raise a family, and Connecticut’s inclusive marriage laws might help them to attract a more competitive pool of employees. The most well-dressed, highly productive members of the labor force want to live and work in a state where the law treats them as first-class citizens – why wouldn’t we do everything we can to make them want to live and do business in New York?

The fact of the matter is that gay families are great for the economy; they’re hip, they’re ahead of so many market trends, they are more likely to have two incomes and less likely to have children – and when they do have kids, it kind of has to be the result of a thoroughly-planned, well-thought decision. Families headed by same-sex couples are more likely to pay taxes for schools and less likely to have kids to send to them - but when they do, wouldn't you imagine they would be the most meticulous parents?

To put it more blunty, it is in the direct financial interest of every state, county and municipal government with revenues dependent upon property taxes to attract families with two moms and two dads, because when gay people move into a neighborhood the value of real estate rises. If you’ve ever been to Hudson, New York, you would see before your eyes how an influx of gay antiques dealers, innkeepers and restaurateurs took a rusting, depressed Upstate town and gave it a makeover into a relatively-booming Mecca for weekenders and gentlewomen farmers!

So when the the New York State Senate takes up the same-sex marriage bill, do they really want to take this opportunity to uphold our state's long proud history of welcoming immigrants of all cultures, stripes and hues, upholding the rights of refugees who fled violence and repression... and, by the way, effortlessly improve the state's fiscal standing?

Or will they reject it out of some combination of bigotry, malice or cowardice?
After almost every state in the region has steadily progressed towards marriage equality, do they want New York to be the state that balked under pressure from the Paladino Republicans and the "Christian values" wing of the Dixiecrats? What Grinch of a statesman wakes up, puts on a suite and tie, and stands up before the body public to say "Actually, I object to these tens of thousands of New Yorkers from wedding"? If lawmakers in Albany won't welcome their sisters and brothers in the very state that invented Liberation, they’re going to settle down in Massachusetts or Connecticut and take their money with them.

Unfortunately, the numbers don’t evince that legalizing same-sex marriage could be the silver bullet which singlehandedly digs this state us out of this deep recession; to do that, we might have to end the war in Afghanistan, curb the cost of health care by establishing a public option, invest $800 billion into modernizing our energy infrastructure, shift the tax burden from the wages of the working class to the estates, trusts and dividends of the super-rich, found a market for carbon permits, abolish mandatory minimum sentencing and legalize marijuana…

Nevertheless, even if legalizing same-sex marriage would only promise to increase the New York state private sector by roughly $184 million in additional commerce, cut the state deficit by $108 million and create roughly 2,000 additional full-time jobs, that sounds to me like a substantial first step towards economic recovery. Legalizing same-sex marriage might not be more than a modest reform, it might not be the superlatively most comprehensive strategy to vitalize business growth – but you must admit that it would certainly be the most fabulous way to stimulate the economy.

In India, More Women Demand Toilets Before Marriage

2011-03-05T06:17:00.001-08:00

Here's an absolutely wonderful article in The Washington Post explaining how the development of water sanitation infrastructure goes hand in hand with social development, namely the empowerment of women.

Moreover, this article hammers home a point that I really struggled to convey to my young male Malian friends: Improving your toilet improves your chance of gettin laid! If you don't have a quality toilet and septic tank, ain't no girl gonna be into you!

Maybe one day I could even disseminate similar sentiments about greywater recycling, urine separating and composting toilets amongst my American brethren... (insh'allah)

Zac Mason on Eco Brooklyn and Riverkeeper!

2011-03-03T14:05:00.000-08:00

Dear loyal readers,

I have recently been hired by this really awesome green builder/renovator called Eco Brooklyn – which is why I have not been writing a whole lot of extensive blog posts as of late. I have been busy waking up before dawn salvaging construction materials, transporting them to various sites around Brooklyn, Queens and Harlem; digging out a basement, mixing mortar, cement and rammed earth, hauling rocks and bricks and other extremely heavy labors. Commuting to do construction work is kicking my ass; however, I’m learning a whole lot about green tech with hands-on experience. Moreover, it has been discovered that I can also be an asset to this team by blogging extensively about green construction technologies and practices!

Hopefully some of the time I will be able to write about tech matters and local policy, be allowed to use those postings directly on this blog as well. And Riverkeeper is also interested in me doing some blogging for them too… That doesn’t mean that Zacstravaganza is going soft – no sirree – rather, look forward to Zacstravaganza becoming hardcore environmental and straight up New York – from the Croton Watershed and the Hudson River to the NYC sewer system and the Gowanus Canal!

So check out my soapbox on Eco Brooklyn and Riverkeeper’s respective blogs – I will at least be cross-linking all updates over here if not rebroadcasting them verbatim on Zacstravaganza. My first post for the former is on how Eco Brooklyn minimizes its carbon footprint compared to competing New York contractors by using exclusively salvaged cement and other post-consumer construction materials!

Can Mali be Weaned Off Aid?

2011-02-21T17:17:00.000-08:00

Once again, British journalists are kicking their American counterparts' collective bottoms when it comes to asking the tough questions on aid and development. Jonathan Glennie of The Guardian broaches the 9,000 pink sogoba in the room in this refreshingly candid look at why practical solutions to aid dependency might exist, they nevertheless remain politically impossible in one of West Africa's rare democracies.

The Elements of Style @ The Local 269

2011-02-19T08:30:00.000-08:00

The Elements of Style return to the Lower East Side! Join us at The Local 269 for a night of dancing and partying!

The Local 269
269 E Houston St (b/w Ave A & B)
New York, NY

Cover is $5 (sorry! we talked them down from $7). Our set runs from 10-11:30.

Check out our new website! Look for pictures of yourself getting down to the rock and roll music! Here, documented proof that The Elements of Style guarantee good times. And if you do not enjoy yourself at our next show, then fuck you.

Fundimensionals @ The Crash Mansion, Bitter End

2011-02-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

Does your idea of fun consist of driving to summer music festivals, camping out and dancing in the mud with all of your best friends and thousands of new friends you’ve met before? Do you like improvised, free-ranging guitar solos? Do you believe that rhythm is not just an accompaniment to but at least a full 50 percent of what makes a grooving rock show? Do you like jam bands like The Grateful Dead, Phish, Umphrey’s Magee and moe.?

If so, then you would like Fundimensionals!

Fundimensionals are an up-and-coming fixture of the jam band universe all hailing from Westchester, New York. They feature the guitar and songwriting by Ben Malmed, the effect wizardry of guitarist Alex Sciortino and keyboard skills of Brandon Goodman. Tone-freak bassist and producer Russell Starkey grooves hard with the raging drums/percussion combo of Carter Burgess and Aaron Hagele. All of the members of this band believe in a boundless approach to music; all members contribute to composition and all members sing. Widespread influences have made Fundimensionals a truly eclectic group, incorporating rock, blues, jazz, funk, electronic music.

You can see Fundimensionals at the Furthur/Allman Brothers After-Party at the Crash Mansion on Friday, March 11th, 2011. Fundimensionals estimated showtime is 12:30 AM. Open bar (vodka drinks) from 9-10:00, $4 beers and $5 mixed drink specials all night! $1 shots all night if you dress for the black and blue theme!

Crash Mansion
199 Bowery
New York, NY

Also, see the Fundimensionals at The Bitter End - New York City's oldest rock club - on Saturday, April 2, 2011! They will be opening for the New York Funk Exchange and Dirty Paris!

The Bitter End
147 Bleeker Street
New York, NY

In the meantime, check out Fundimensionals' self-titled debut album, mastered by Grammy-nominated David Kutch (The Roots, Outkast, Alicia Keys) and recorded by Rich Fabrizio at Frequency Recording. This album has been released independently now!!! You can buy a copy by contacting the band directly, and soon it will be available for purchase on iTunes, CDbaby.com and their website, Myspace, Facebook! Listen for free on the Fundimensionals' bandsite! Also look for them in the March 2011 issue of Relix Magazine; "Bugless Brunch" off the album will be featured on their monthly sampler CD!

The Worldly Appeal of Jon Huntsman, Jr.

2011-02-01T18:02:00.000-08:00

The announcement of Jon Huntsman, Jr. that he will resign his post as U.S. Ambassador to China should by no means be taken lightly. After all, if Huntsman does indeed throw his hat in the ring for the 2012 Republican nomination – as is widely expected – he will be the only candidate in the race with any formidable experience in foreign policy and national security, let alone enough to go toe-to-toe with President Obama in the general election. Any way that you look at it, Huntsman’s résumé stands out head and shoulders above all of his GOP rivals.

If Republican primary voters and caucus-goers were to pledge their delegates on the same basis of experience and competency that most job-seekers are evaluated, this contest should be a no-brainer. So far there are already six current and former Governors expected to declare their candidacies in the Republican race; Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels. So if Huntsman joins the pack then the 2012 debates could perhaps stand out to the delight of conservative policy wonks across the country as a great comparison of policies among seven different Republican administrations. Likely a number of these Republican Governors might cancel each other out fighting for the same constituencies (e.g. Huckabee and Barbour), and the candidate who can best demonstrate something unique about their breadth of experience and ability should set him or herself apart from the rest.

In a primary race so far dominated by Governors, foreign policy gravitas seems to be the one thing that every single candidate lacks – except of course Huntsman. This is a very big deal, especially for the Republicans which have branded themselves post-1945 as the party of the Cold War and the War on Terrorism. Historically, the GOP has been particularly inclined to nominate the candidate with the strongest claim to the national security establishment (e.g. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush) or decorated veterans of foreign wars who translated their personal heroics into Senate leadership on military and foreign policy (Barry Goldwater, Bob Dole, John McCain). Even Gerald Ford served in the Navy in the Pacific Theater and served in the House and as Vice President as a dedicated internationalist. Reagan… well, at least he made war films for the USO…

For comparison, let’s take a look at Jon Huntsman, Jr.’s C.V.:

U.S. Ambassador to China
Governor of Utah
CEO, Huntsman Family Holdings Co.
Deputy U.S. Trade Representative
President, Huntsman Cancer Foundation
U.S. Ambassador to Singapore
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Asia
White House Staff Assistant

Education: B.A. University of Pennsylvania

Skills: Fluent in Mandarin Chinese

In 2008, such a career profile might have made Huntsman an ideal candidate for Ambassador to the United Nations or Secretary of State in the McCain administration that might have been… Though in 2012, this swarthy record of accomplishment makes him the unparalleled leader of the GOP presidential aspirants in terms of doing anything at all outside of the confines of their home state.

Even George W. Bush's stint in the Texas Air National Guard dwarfs the military experience that can be claimed by every last declared or likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2012. Only Mitt Romney among them has had any experience having worked and lived overseas having spent 30 months as a Mormon missionary to France - and Huntsman can match that with his Mormon mission to Taiwan, let alone his Ambassadorships to the People's Repubic of China and Singapore.

Indeed, some of the secondi-tier candidates from Congress, i.e. Newt Gingrich, John Thune, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul have taken the occasional vote on matters of war and peace. However, they remain certainly lacking in the kind of stature enjoyed by the likes of Goldwater, Dole or McCain when they ran for president. Writing the occasional Op-Ed on foreign policy to the Washington Post, on the American Enterprise Institute blog or on your Twitter account - or rather, ghost-written in your name - does not constitute foreign policy experience. Thusfar, in addition to Huntsman only current Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has had any experience at all working in the executive branch – and let’s be honest, few except for professional politicos even know what the acronym OMB stands for let alone what Daniels did as its Director during the Bush administration.

Of course, lack of prior foreign policy experience does not preclude the possibility of a victorious presidential campaign or even a relatively-successful presidency on matters of foreign policy (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II); though it certainly helps in the effort to establish credibility in the minds of voters. Jon Huntsman, Jr.’s unique background as both a popular Governor as well as an accomplished diplomat and trade representative undoubtedly puts him at the top of my list for the GOP presidential nomination; if I were a Republican genuinely interested in demonstrating that my party is credible to lead America before the world, I would be doing everything I could to ensure a Jon Huntsman-Condoleeza Rice ticket in 2012.

To reinforce my point, let’s look at the highlights of the foreign policy backgrounds of the rest of the Republican presidential aspirants in 2012:

Mitt Romney – served as a Mormon missionary in France for 30 months, organized the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, wrote an Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post lambasting the bipartisanly-supported New START Treaty.

Sarah Palin – Governor of a state that shares a border with Canada; can see Russia from her house. As the GOP candidate for Vice President in 2008 Palin called for U.S. military intervention in Georgia against Russia, did not know what the Bush Doctrine was, demonstrated complete and utter ignorance on the most rudimentary basics of foreign affairs.

Tim Pawlenty – Governor of another state that shares a border with Canada; in 2004 the President of Mexico met with Pawlenty to announce the opening of a Mexican consulate in St. Paul so that Mexican citizens would not have to travel all the way to Chicago to process passport and visa applications.

Mike Huckabee – None whatsoever, though caused a stir as a GOP candidate in 2008 when he published a blatantly ghost-written article in Foreign Affairs magazine accusing the Bush administration of having an “arrogant bunker mentality”.

Haley Barbour – None whatsoever.

Mitch Daniels – As the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Daniels served as the Bush administration’s point man to discredit then-Assistant to the President on Economic Policy Lawrence Lindsey estimate that Operation Iraqi Freedom would cost between $100 and $200 billion – Daniels toured the talk show circuit, stating that the war would in fact cost between $50 and $60 billion.

John Thune – Jonah Goldberg of Politico writes, “In many respects, Thune is the GOP version of John Kerry: a candidate with very presidential hair who seems 'electable' despite not having done much of anything." As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Thune’s record has consisted of little more notable than voting to support the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and lobbying against the closure of Ellsworth Air Force Base – once a significant economic engine in South Dakota.

Newt Gingrich – As Speaker of the House from 1995-1998, Gingrich stymied the Clinton administration’s foreign policy by opposing the Clinton administration’s military inventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan and Afghanistan, ran Congressional resistance to the Oslo peace process and blocked funding for the United Nations. In recent years, Newt’s grandest foray into foreign affairs has largely consisted of his railing against the proposed “Ground Zero mosque” – in one notable instance comparing the establishment of an Islamic cultural center to Nazis demonstrating next to the Holocaust Museum.

Rudy Giuliani – As Mayor of New York City Giulani responded to the initial 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center by establishing an emergency command center in its basement, later presided over the worst terrorist attack in the history of the United States, once expelled Yasser Arafat from a concert at Lincoln Center.

Rick Santorum – As a Senator from Pennsylvania Santorum voted for an end to the arms embargo and for the Clinton administration’s use of force in Bosnia, against the use of force in Kosovo, for the Bush administration’s use of force in Iraq and voted against a timetable for withdrawal. Santorum sponsored the Iran Freedom and Support Act which appropriated $10 million for regime change in Iran, and he was also one of only two Senators to vote against the confirmation of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense.

Chris Glenn and Matt Rocchio @ Banjo Jim's

2011-02-01T09:45:00.000-08:00

CHRIS GLENN AND MATT ROCCHIO (BASS AND BACKUP VOCALS)
THURSDAY FEB. 3RD @ 8P.M.
BANJO JIMS
700 E. 9th St. (9th and ave. C)
New York, NY

No Cover!

Chris Glenn has opened for Tori Amos and the Marshall Tucker Band, played at Woodstock (1999), was the first artist on Bitter End Records and was called "the best lyricist going" by author Myra Friedman. Accompanied by Matt Rocchio, his lyrics and melodies evoke both Oklahoma and New York City roots. You mght know Rocchio as the bassist for Susan Sed. John Jay High School and John Jay Middle School graduates, you probably member him as the gnarliest teacher ever!!!!! Yeahhh Mr. Rocchio!!!!!

"Jesus on a Bad Day"

Rae Sterling @ Sidewalk Cafe

2011-01-31T10:14:00.000-08:00

Rae Sterling is a singer-songwriter with a big, soul-style voice and catchy tunes. She writes clever lyrics that can be a little bit funny and a little bit sad... You might already know her as the alto from the Bluestockings or as the charming chanteuse who joined The Elements of Style onstage at our last show for "Brown-Eyed Girl"! But Rae is even more radically excellent as a solo artist who writes, plays guitar and sings her own originals! Go see her at New York's legendary anti-folk stomping ground!

Tuesday, February 8th, 10:00pm

Sidewalk Cafe
94 Avenue A
New York, NY

For a sampling of Rae's groovy sound, check out some videos from her prolific YouTube channel:

"Got it Bad"

"Paper Cranes"

Will Nan Hayworth Vote as a Rockefeller Republican or a Tea Party Extremist?

2011-01-22T09:27:00.001-08:00

Now that the 112th Congress has been sworn in, New York’s 19th Congressional District is represented by Mount Kisco ophthalmologist and a freshman Republican Nan Hayworth. Rep. Hayworth’s voting record should be up for exacting scrutiny – perhaps even more so than the rest of the New York delegation on Capitol Hill – because her constituency in northern Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess and Orange counties has been one of the most fickle swing districts in the United States over the past few election cycles.

Belying New York’s solidly Democratic trends in recent statewide and presidential elections, the GOP has always found a receptive bastion in the New York City suburbs, exurbs and small towns Upstate. NY-19 spans all of those demographic zones. This swing district in the disproportionately upper-income exurbs and working class white towns has historically churned out from the moderate wing of the Republican Party who have demonstrated independence from the partisan leadership in Washington and supported liberal positions on civil rights and the environment. From 1969 through 1994 the 19th district was represented by Hamilton Fish IV – a leader of the liberal Rockefeller Republican wing who voted for two out of three Articles of Impeachment against President Nixon. In 1994 Fish was succeeded by the Katonah denizen Sue Kelly – who positioned herself squarely in the Republican Main Street Partnership, Republicans for Choice and Republicans for Environmental Protection.

Though the 19th Congressional District certainly trends red, it has proved to be not so solidly Republican that GOP Representatives elected here can get away with simply catering to the party’s base and ignoring swing voters. The decidedly independent exurbanites of the 19th District soured on Sue Kelly as she voted for the most divisive excesses of the Republican leadership; a Federal Marriage Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in all states, draconian spending cuts on Medicaid and student loans, and particularly as she doggedly supported what was increasingly perceived as a failing course in Iraq. Moreover, in a year when the House GOP leadership was tarnished by scandal, Representative Kelly came under fire as the Chair of the House Page Board which administered the program amidst the Mark Foley fiasco. In 2006 independent voters bolted.

New York’s 19th Congressional District has been represented so consistently by Republicans for so many decades that the DCCC rarely assembled more than token opposition. Though in 2006, the Republican incumbent was turned out of office by the dark horse Democratic candidate John Hall – a professional rock musician most famous for his guitar and vocals with the band Orleans. Unlike most other 2006 Democratic freshmen, John Hall ran on an unabashedly progressive platform of clean energy, environmental protection, expanding health care coverage and ending the war in Iraq – according to the strategems of the Clintonite New Democrats, he should have lost. But Hall managed to eke out a surprise 51% to 49% victory because he put together the most serious, well-funded Democratic campaign this district had seen in years. John Hall also benefited from a nationwide Democratic wave which proved devastating for most Northeastern Republicans, nowhere more than this quintessential blue state where in 2006 the ballots were headed by the enormously popular Hillary Clinton and Eliot Spitzer. In 2008, an even stronger blue election cycle when Democratic candidates nationwide rode on the long coattails of Barack Obama, Hall won re-election with 59% of the vote.

Though the Democratic candidates performed exceptionally well in 2006 and 2008, even their gains in the Northeast turned out not to be the “national realignment” that some politicos took them for. In the 2010 round of midterm elections, the four-year tenure of John Hall was cut short by GOP challenger Nan Hayworth. Compared to 2006, in 2010 both the DCCC and RCCC regarded NY-19 as a competitive race from the get-go; the latter named Hayworth as one of their “Young Guns”. Even in a in a year when unemployment hovered above 9% and discontented voters were eager to oust incumbents, a red tsunami of a midterm cycle which decimated the ranks of 63 Democratic House members including 5 more from the New York City suburbs and Upstate, Nan Hayworth only won with a modest 52.7% of the vote over Hall’s 47.3%. In other words, even in this election cycle when Republican challengers nationwide had every external factor going in their favor, this was still a very close election. If there is any lesson to be taken home, it is that both parties should now consider NY-19 less like the bastion of moderate Northeastern Republicanism it once was and more like the model swing district that it now is.

Given the competitive nature of the 19th District and the historically persuasion of Hamilton Fish , Sue Kelly and the kind of Republicans which this constituency normally supports, one might expect our new Congresswoman Nan Hayworth to vote well within the moderate faction of the GOP. However, all signs thusfar portend that Hayworth – who enthusiastically received the endorsement of Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, the National Rifle Association and the Tri-State Sons of Liberty – hails not from the Northeastern moderates once known as “Rockefeller Republicans” but as a firebrand from the right wing of the Republican Party. A proponent of Big Tent-ism she is not; Putnam County activist Jay Michaelson labels the election of Hayworth as “The End of Rockefeller Republicanism”; Bush speechwriter David Frum has described the Princeton- and Cornell-educated Hayworth as “New York's Ivy League Tea Partier”.

Nan Hayworth might not exude the cultural pseudo-populism of her fellow class of 2010 Republican freshmen; unlike the heartland districts where the GOP made most of its electoral gains in 2010, it is not very socially acceptable to espouse openly xenophobic positions in Hayworth’s native Mount Kisco – a multiethnic community with large Black, Latino and Jewish populations. Though what makes Hayworth so appealing to the Tea Party groups which backed her campaign is her dogmatic free market ideology. In his post-election piece in the New York Times, Peter Applebome explains the formation of Hayworth’s views on economics:

To hear her tell it, her life changed in high school, when, at her father’s urging, she read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, a popular explication of laissez-faire economics, whose listing on Amazon.com features endorsements by Ayn Rand and Ron Paul.

Often Ms. Hayworth sounds as if she is quoting from it: “Private enterprise must thrive. It must flourish. And it must do so without the federal government putting a finger on the scale.”

As for the abuses of business, her attitude seems mostly to blame the government (the mortgage market, for example, was warped by government interference) or to figure that stuff happens.

The best way to predict how Hayworth might vote over the course of the next two years might be to analyze who contributed to her campaign; in her own words in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, “Funding finds its way to a cause”. And not surprisingly, the bulk of the funding for Nan Hayworth’s campaign came from banks, insurance companies, HMOs and the local health care industry which have plenty of chits to cash in from their clientele in Congress (compared to Sue Kelly –who fundraised from a greater variety of business interests – it is interesting to note that Hayworth’s campaign contributions came so disproportionately from the financial and health care sectors). Already Hayworth has voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – the number one item on the health care industry’s agenda. Over the next few months she can be expected to vote to dismantle the Dodd-Frank legislation on financial regulations, to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the highest tax brackets, to abolish the Estate Tax, and other measures meant to protect the profits of her financial patrons.

In addition to the boilerplate economic issues that all Republican candidates campaigned upon in 2010, it will be telling to watch how Congresswoman Hayworth is going to vote on any proposed changes to our national gun control and mental health laws in response to the Tucson shootings. So far, it seems that the most pivotal legislation will be that introduced by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D NY-4) that would ban high-capacity magazines like the 33-round clip used in Arizona. According to The Poughkeepsie Journal, the 19th District’s new U.S. Representative is opposed to even the most modest measures of reforming national gun laws.

Freshman Republican Rep. Nan Hayworth of Mount Kisco, Westchester County, said that even if McCarthy's proposal became law, it would be circumvented. "There would be an extensive secondary market," she said. "So these clips would still be available."

Amazingly enough, Hayworth contends that she will respond to this deadly commerce in extended ammo clips with no legitimate civilian use by voting for the United States government to sit on their hands, parroting the press releases of the National Rifle Association - her campaign’s 9th-largest contributor. Even on the matter of mental health policy – which national Republicans are now hoisting as a cudgel with which to address the Tucson massacre and sidestep gun control altogether – Hayworth promulgates the archaic doctrine of federal impotency.

"The relevant law has been established," she said. "It is incumbent on the state of Arizona to determine how better to enforce it. I don't feel this is a matter for the Congress to pursue at this time."

If Nan Hayworth’s response to the first national crisis of the 112th Congress is going to be emblematic of her voting record for the remainder of her term, it might portend that she will vote to maintain the deregulation of business and public sector minimalism to the most absurd limits of Henry Hazlitt’s laissez faire ideology.

From the narrow standpoint of politics, Hayworth’s posturing on the Second Amendment may or may not translate into electoral dividends come November 2012. Granted, New York’s 19th Congressional District includes the small towns of Putnam, Dutchess and Orange County where the endorsement of the NRA carries a lot of weight amongst the large gun-owning electorate. But they also include Rockland and Westchester County which are home to more suburbanites who sit on the other end of the cultural divide and are more likely to hold a politician’s reflexive obedience to the NRA as a fault against them. Even in 2010 Hall won these counties – including Hayworth’s native Mount Kisco. If common sense gun control legislation like Rep. McCarthy’s high-capacity magazine bill is brought to a vote and Hayworth obediently tows the line of her campaign financiers, then suburban independents might very well jump ship come 2012.

The 19th District is certainly more conservative than New York State as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that Republican office-holders here can speak and act like Republicans from Texas or Alabama and coast to re-election (there is a reason Hayworth’s campaign literature almost ignored social issues altogether and focused incessantly on health care and taxes). So the working class whites of Brewster and Carmel are upset by the influx of Mexican immigrants and the swift cultural transitions happening in their communities – but if Nan Hayworth votes for any Arizona-style immigration laws then the rapidly-growing Hispanic electorate in these counties is going to vote en masse for her opponent in 2012. If John Boehner schedules a vote on a bill meant to scuttle the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or if he resurrects the Federal Marriage Amendment as an election year wedge and Hayworth votes reflexively with her party, the Journal News and the Poughkeepsie Journal will almost certainly cast Hayworth as a bigot – and rightly so. New York is simply too cosmopolitan an environment to be conducive to the Kulturkampf which passes for politics elsewhere in the heartland.

Nan Hayworth’s Tea Party posturing might have been largely ignored in an outlier election cycle all-but-defined by a sluggish economy, rampant unemployment and a climate preternaturally hostile to incumbents, but she should be wary of voting as though there were no tomorrow when the Democratic Party is going to put up a spirited opposition in every future election in this swing district. In November 2012 when New York is expected to vote heavily for Obama and Gillibrand’s re-election and straight-line voting should help all Democratic candidates lower on the ballot without any countervailing Republican wind, NY-19 is surely going to serve as a prime pickup opportunity for the DCCC. So if Nan Hayworth wants to serve another term in Congress after this one, she should emulate the example set by moderate Northeastern Republican Senators Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Scott Brown and consider breaking with her party to vote for the occasional Democratic-sponsored bill every now and then. If Hayworth does not demonstrate independence from the national Republican Party, and especially if she votes consistently with the Tea Party Caucus, then she is only going to hand this seat to her Democratic challenger in 2012.

Drinking Bottled or Filtered Water Could Increase the Risk of Tooth Decay

2011-01-18T06:22:00.000-08:00

In today's edition of the Washington Post Juliet Eilperin writes that limiting the consumption of tap water could - by cutting yourself off from what is the primary source of fluoride for the vast majority of Americans - result in a greater risk of tooth decay and cavities.

The Shortcomings of Microcredit

2011-01-10T07:55:00.000-08:00

Don’t get me wrong; I think that microcredit can be a wonderful tool to foster gainful employment and reduce poverty amongst the most financially-marginalized segments of the population. One of the primary financial barriers to poverty-reducing economic development in Second and Third World countries is that credit is only readily available to established business interests and entrenched elites; in countries like Bangladesh where Dr. Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank, microcredit banks have indeed opened up entrepreneurial opportunities to rural peasants, the urban poor and women. And microcredit has not only served as a boon for the poor in Dhaka and Calcutta; microcredit programs have helped financially-marginalized groups to capitalize upon their innate entrepreneurial potential in places as varied as Harlem to rural Arkansas.

However, I’m glad to see that the New York Times is finally reporting that microcredit is something less than the miracle cure for poverty that it’s all too often cracked up to be. Critics of microcredit have long abounded on the ideological antipodes – diehard leftists oppose Dr. Yunus’ movement because it threatens the promise of State Socialism, and paradoxically enough free market purists object to the Grameen Bank’s dependency upon government subsidies. But when such a pillar of mainstream liberalism as The Grey Lady is reporting on the shortfalls of microcredit, now even the material objectivist must acknowledge that - like any other money manager – even some of the most well-meaning bankers to the poor have been been practicing reckless lending policies.

Nevertheless, especially since the popularization of the term microcredit from development circles to lay audiences, most lending institutions throughout the world are keen to at least rhetorically jump on the microcredit bandwagon – and the vast majority of self-described "microcreditors" have significantly less scrupulous lending and management practices than the Grameen Bank.

When most people hear the term microcredit they think of a financial scheme which extends loans to the poor at low, easily-repayable interest rates. However, all that a bank needs to do to call itself a “microcredit institution” in most developing countries is to conduct any banking activity under the broad premise of lending very small amounts of money with the stated intent of reducing poverty. What should separate microcredit from common loan-sharking is that the former species of loans to the poor should be issued at low interest rates. However, what constitutes "low interest rates" is relative. In countries where borrowers tend to pay grossly usurious rates along the lines of 60 percent annual interest, it is not so terribly dishonest for a bank to issue small loans to the poor at only mildly less usurious interest rates – say, 40 percent – and call themselves "microcreditors".

Microcredit can be empowering if a bank extends a loan of $20 to an unemployed Bolivian woman who wants to set up an empanada stand. But microcredit can just as easily refer to a situation in which a bank lends $20 to that same unemployed Bolivian woman to buy a pair of Jimmy Choo knock-offs. Predatory loans come in small sizes too. Particularly in economies where banks do not offer adequate financial products for individuals to save their money for regular consumption, it is fairly common practice for individuals to take out micro-loans for items that have little to no potential to be described as “business investments”.

In Mali, people often take out small loans from the local Kafo Jiginew franchise as Americans pay for our large expenditures on credit cards. One common big-ticket item that rural, property-less farmers will take out loans for is a motorcycle; one would argue that a new gasoline-powered motorbike is necessary to improve the efficiency of his business – he could travel to markets in nearby cities to sell their goats and chickens more quickly. Under such fairly valid-sounding proposals, the loan officer would lend them $600 to $700 for the cheapest bike on the market. But the economic reality is that the real value of a motorcycle in a proto-commercial agricultural economy is not derived from any profit that could be measured in dollars and cents. The total benefit of this microcredit-financed endeavor is more or less the sum of the value of time saved and the sheer prestige of driving around the village in a motorcycle – neither of which is going to help him sell any more chickens. Now, the farmer’s financial standing is even more precarious as he has to pay for gasoline for his bike and interest on his loan with more free time but no additional monetary income to show for it. From capital’s self-interested perspective this loan might have been a pretty shoddy investment decision – yet a bank like Kafo Jiginew has every right to classify such reckless lending as “microcredit”.

Compared to other endeavors for which banks issue micro-loans, a motorcycle is sadly a relatively sound investment. It’s somewhat less common for microfinance institutions to give small loans of a few hundred dollars to people who wish to buy cell phones and computers for their business operations which are used more often for listening to mp3s and downloading porn than they are for any profit-increasing business communications. Other times men would take out small loans of $10 or $20 to bet on the horses in France – consider it micro-leverage for investment on the commodities market. It is even more common for people in countries with underdeveloped financial institutions to take out exorbitant loans for things as frivolous as televisions, alcohol and cigarettes. If you think that subprime lending is a phenomenon exclusive to the U.S. real estate market, then you are sorely mistaken.

Economies predicated upon agriculture are particularly sensitive to predatory lending practices because the brief period after the harvest is typically the only time that peasant farmers ever stand to receive any monetary income. In the least-developed, poorest of the poor agricultural economies like parched Niger and Mauritania, the single millet harvests only come after the year’s brief, single rainy season; in significantly more prosperous and developed agricultural economies like Ghana and Tanzania, there might be enough rainfall for two long growing seasons so farmers’ revenues come in twice a year. When an economy based on rain-irrigated agriculture faces a drought, every single farmer might need to take out a loan in order to feed his family. However, loans taken out to finance pure consumption are not likely to ever be repaid – especially in a subsistence agricultural economy in which food is rarely sold on the market in exchange for currency. With so much demand for credit, interest rates rightfully go way up. The politically incorrect truth is that there is a rational reason why interest rates in these credit markets are generally so high: in developing, stagnant and regressing agrarian economies alike, the rural poor are not very creditworthy.

But the world’s poor still need to be able to obtain capital without resorting to debt slavery if they are ever to improve their lot. The advent of Grameen-style microcredit is without a doubt a step in the right direction as it popularizes and democratizes lending, but it is also no panacea to the ills of the various financial sectors of the developing world. So what then should the doe-eyed idealists of Davos, Wall Street and Cambridge do if they sincerely wish to rid the world of poverty?

The harsh reality is that aside from conducting checkbook activism on Kiva, there are not a whole lot of options available for private good-doers to extend affordable credit to small entrepreneurs in the Hindu Kush. The opportunities to improve the lending practices of the Global South lie for the most part at the feet of the banking and government elite who reside in the gated communities of these countries’ capitols – in so many words, the very individuals who have the most vested interest in the status quo and not a whole lot of desire to expand credit to the masses who live in shantytowns and mud huts. Western development agents and business consultants might have a role to play in reforming the financial sectors of foreign nation, but only insomuch as we can educate and persuade these elites to implement change in their respective institutions.

Bankers in countries like Guinea and the Ivory Coast tend to practice such egregious usury partly because they make a disproportionate amount of loans to their friends and family-members. In many African cultures it is considered the social obligation of anyone with money to share it with anyone and everyone who might ask for a handout; not only for the haves to lend money to the have-nots, but for the haves to simply give it away – people who keep all of their money to themselves are often shunned and isolated from the rest of the village. Judging by the rate at which credit applicants actually get denied, it would be fair to say that such communitarian social mores are expressed in the decisions of loan officers who simply can’t say no to their blood relatives no matter what sort of lavish status symbols they plan on buying on credit. Not surprisingly, a sizeable portion of these terrible loans never get amortized, so banks do have to charge high interest rates on all of their loans – large and small – simply in order to stay in business. In order to stem the worst of the worst lending decisions and make credit more accessible, banks need to crack down on crony capitalism by introducing stricter standards of professional ethics, increasing transparency in their lending practices and holding loan officers accountable when they issue such egregious loans.

Another one of the reasons why interest rates remain so daunting to would-be entrepreneurs in the Global South is that so many of the microloans issued by banks go to finance not just business investments but also consumption goods that cannot lead to direct financial returns. According to free market ideals people should be able to spend and consume as they want to without having to go into debt, but banks have to start offering modern financial products in order for that ideal to become a reality. Microcredit is only part of the equation; what the world’s poor need even more desperately is some form of microsavings. In many of the countries where microcredit is needed there simply are no financial products which reward small account holders for saving; in these markets, people have to pay the bank exorbitant fees simply in order to keep an account open and thus saving money in a bank account is a losing endeavor for all but the super-rich. If the yeoman farmers and proletarians of the world could stow their money away in bank accounts which reward savers with interest instead of vice versa, they would be able to pay for things like emergency health care without having to resort to the crushing debt which crowds out the market and stifles entrepreneurship. Microsavings is even more necessary for the rural peasants and urban poor of the world to accumulate their own capital to start a small business independent of the whims of any bank – a phenomenon which could foster the strengthening of bourgeoisies and middle classes in societies dangerously stratified between the tiny financial elites and the sprawling, starving masses.

In order to obviate the absolute most predatory sort of micro-lending, quasi-modern banks also need to take a step backward in order to go forward by creating new financial services which cater to those borrowers whose means of production remains defined by pre-capitalist subsistence agriculture. In particular, banks which issue microcredit and microsavings accounts to the poor need to establish cereal banking divisions which allow small farmers to deposit their surplus in years of good harvests and to withdraw a few sacks of millet, rice or corn to feed their families in years of drought and blight. Chauvinists of Western capitalism might be inclined to pooh-pooh cereal banking as a philanthropic sideshow, but those who think that the archaic proto-commercial economy has nothing to do with the shortage of affordable credit in the relatively modern money market are profoundly mistaken. When there is a drought which threatens the subsistence farming population with starvation, everybody wants to take out loans from the bank to pay for basic foodstuffs – loans which most likely will never be repaid by people who have no source of monetary income – and so interest rates skyrocket for everyone. The expansion and development of cereal banking can serve to reduce the risk of all participants in the money market and should drive down interest rates for all borrowers – including those who wish to take out a loan to start a new cash business.

The impoverished masses of the underdeveloped world are also shut out from affordable credit largely because in most of these countries where they live the law does not recognize any titles or deeds to the one thing they have: the land they live on. As a result, peasant farmers and urban slum-dwellers have no de jure property they can use as collateral to help them receive a favorable loan. Developing countries should heed the advice of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto and overhaul their property laws to codify the de facto land property of the credit-needy poor so that they can collateralize what little they do have. Champions of traditionalism and leftists opposed to private property in general howl at what they perceive as the injustice of such unabashed Neoliberalism and Western imperialism – but I dare de Soto’s detractors to come up with a better way of addressing the basic causality between land that cannot be collateralized and the paucity of affordable credit. If the humanitarians of the world are so genuinely concerned about predatory lending, they should applaud the efforts of the World Bank, USAID and the like when they push such property-livening legal reforms which could serve to reduce the incentive for banks to charge such usurious interest rates in the first place.

Microcredit has warts just like any other financial product, but the shortcomings of this strategy to foster economic growth and poverty reduction do not mean that it must be discarded to the ash heap of history. Indeed, much of the Global South’s economic ills could be abated if their respective banks were to simply begin genuine microfinance programs which emulate the Grameen Bank’s commitment to issuing loans at low, affordable interest rates strictly for the purpose of business development. Yet the expansion of real microcredit is only a partial reform of economic systems which fail the bottom billion of the world's poor; if these countries are ever going to fix their credit markets in a way that systematically reduces let alone eliminates poverty, their bankers, borrowers and legislators are going to have to comprehensively reform their financial practices.

The Elements of Style @ Fat Baby

2011-01-04T20:55:00.001-08:00

Put on your drinking boots, because The Elements of Style are gonna rock the Lower East Side!

Pants optional.

Saturday, January 8 at 10:00pm - January 9 at 12:00am

Fat Baby
112 Rivington Street
New York, NY

Fat Baby has 3 levels - we'll be in the lower level, at the dance floor.
$7 cover - not our call, we asked to have it as low as possible.
Transportation - take the F to Delancy St OR the J/M/Z to Essex St.

VIDEO UPDATE!!!

Thanks to Rae Sterling, Hap Shashy and Spencer Robins, we have 2 new videos on YouTube!!!

"Brown-Eyed Girl"

"Evil Woman"

Some Food for Thought

2010-12-29T04:07:00.000-08:00

Over this holiday season I’ve been traveling around Tanzania with my sister who has been volunteering here as a health educator. Though she has been primarily working on HIV/AIDS issues, I of course have been more interested in how this particular African country has been dealing with waterborne diseases. And the fact of the matter is that – just as Tanzania’s economy is experiencing relatively solid growth while Mali is left watching on the sidelines - Tanzania is steadily improving its indicators of water and sanitation while my beloved Mali remains mired in stagnation and disease.

Statistics vary according to the respective methodologies of the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, UNICEF, etc.; and public health statistics are notoriously difficult to measure in the hardly-functional states of sub-Saharan Africa. But the broad picture is clear; though health indicators in Tanzania remain generally abysmal, they are considerably less abysmal in Tanzania than in Mali. Here in Tanzania there is a significantly lower prevalence of diarrhea, giardia, dysentery and cholera; Tanzania has a lower prevalence of death by diarrheal disease, a lower infant mortality rate, a lower child mortality rate, and a slightly greater life expectancy overall.

And in many of the same reports, you will find that only 24 percent of Tanzanians have “access to adequate sanitation facilities” i.e. toilets or latrines. This statistic too is prone to wild estimation and subjectivity, but I think that it may be the most telling. A Westerner might look at this figure and read it to mean Tanzanian sanitation infrastructure is atrocious – I think that would be a fair statement – but they don’t know the meaning of atrocious until they read that only 1/6 of that fraction, a mere 4 percent of Malians have “access to adequate sanitation”. The blunt truth is that beyond the likes of Niger, Mauritania, Haiti, Afghanistan and the very nadir of the most-underdeveloped countries of the world, it is difficult to exceed the sheer disarray of sanitation in the Republic of Mali.

Confined to the realm of pure statistical analysis, one might be inclined to assume that that is the whole story; Tanzanians have more latrines and soak pits than Malians, latrines and soak pits reduce the chance of fecal contamination of the drinking water, therefore Tanzanians have less prevalence of giardia and dysentery and greater life expectancies than Malians. Q.E.D.

But there’s more to it than that. In addition to the existence of water and sanitation infrastructure of the lack thereof, the prevalence of diseases transmitted via the fecal-oral cycle is tied to sanitation practices. Loyal readers of this blog are probably familiar with the fact that Mali’s appalling prevalence of gastrointestinal disease is largely caused by the country’s traditions which entail that the people of that country clean their respective anuses with their respective left hands, they “wash” their hands before eating by mushing their left and right hands together in a tin can of water used by every member of the eating party, and then they eat from a communal food bowl with their respective right hands. Popular Tanzanian anal-cleansing and eating practices are not much better; they generally eat their corn ugali with their hands, very few ever adequately wash their hands with soap, and even fewer use toilet paper or a bidet.

However, there are a few subtle differences. Most notably, when Maasai herders “wash” their hands without soap, they don’t dip their hands into a container of increasingly-filthy water. Instead, the eating rituals of the Maasai culture involve the youngest boy bringing a pitcher of hot water to his elders and pouring it over their hands. Even if they’re not doing a very thorough job of washing their hands, at least they’re not making them even dirtier as the Miniankas are wont to do.

And even though the Maasai maintain the uncouth tradition of eating with their hands, they do not eat with their hands from a communal food bowl. You see, in addition to drinking tea and eating fried potato “chips”, Tanzanians adopted from their former British colonial overlords the practice of eating from individual plates. This – I believe – makes a world of a difference. Even if someone is going to eat ugali with fecal matter-tainted hands and unwittingly practice coprophagy, there is relatively little risk of contracting giardia, dysentery or cholera by ingesting one’s own fecal matter – if there are amoebas in your stools, then you already have amoebic dysentery. The only way to contract fecal-oral cycle-transmitted disease is to ingest someone else’s poo particles – a risk significantly downgraded by a culture that shifts from eating from one shared bowl of food to multiple, individualized bowls of food.

I can only assume that the hygienically-superior eating habits of Tanzanians and their hand-washing practices which at least are not counterproductive probably provide a partial explanation of why this society is significantly less mired in disease than the people of Mali. Of course, this hypothesis would be quite daunting to prove as 1) there is no control group; and 2) if compilations of data on disease prevalence are shaky and “access to adequate sanitation facilities” is much too subjective to ever be analyzed scientifically, any statistic like “the prevalence of adequate hygiene practices” is 100-percent subjective and therefore epidemiologically-useless.

Nevertheless, I suppose that the conclusions are quite clear: cultures that are receptive to amending their cultural practices at least stand a chance of improving their public health and their general standard of living. Conversely, cultures which exhibit little genuine interest in learning how to swim are more liable to sink. If the people of Mali want to sully their hands in each other’s filth and eat with their hands from the same food bowl, then they are going to remain forever mired in gastrointestinal disease.

Zac Mason in the News!

2010-12-28T05:36:00.000-08:00

Two generations of Masons - one a doctor and the other an actual mason - are quoted in the New Canaan Patch on how this recession is taking a toll on the hopes and dreams of 20-somethings.

Though I want to clarify that I vehemently live in Vista, New York and not New Canaan, Connecticut as this article erroneously implies - my only tie to the place is that my dad works there.

And if any other foot soldiers in the reserve army of the unemployed are looking for career opportunities, the Peace Corps is always hiring!

Long Live the Existing Homes Tax Credit!

2010-12-06T12:19:00.000-08:00

I will concede to my Republican friends that there are tax cuts which serve as such a strong incentive to potential consumers that they do stimulate economic activity. I will agree that Congress ought to extend these tax cuts in order to help small businesses weather this deep recession, to create jobs and to reduce the federal deficit – and that it is imperative that they extend these tax cuts as soon as possible so that they don’t expire with the coming new year. In fact, I think that these tax cuts ought to be made permanent.

I’m not talking about the Bush tax cuts, of course. Across-the-board reductions of the income tax rate for the very richest households are amongst the most ineffective job creation policies imaginable because they are absolutely unconditional to any sort of consumer spending, business investment or other job-creating activity. Moreover, these sorts of tax cuts are even more ineffective when they are showered upon those millionaires and billionaires who respond to incentives the least and are more likely to save their tax windfall than to spend or invest it. This is why few economists unaffiliated with the Heritage Foundation or Regent University will tell you that extending the Bush tax cuts to the year 2021 actually amounts to a cost-effective policy to promote economic growth – the CBO estimates that every $1 of the Bush tax cuts has generated only a piddling 40 cents of additional economic activity.

To find such solid growth-oriented and fiscally responsible tax incentives that are targeted towards the most incentive-responsive sectors of the economy, you would have to look at the understated Obama tax cuts embedded in the 2009 stimulus package. Among the most cost-effective growth-oriented policies conducted in recent years have been the extension of the Existing Homes Tax Credit tucked into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This unarguably pragmatic plank of the stimulus package combined Keynesian spending in the form of $5 billion of grants to low-income homeowners and it increased from 10% to 30% for the cost of energy-efficient insulation, windows, roofing, heating, ventilation and cooling systems and with a maximum tax deduction of $1,500. Because these particular tax incentives were tax credits completely conditional on very specific species of investments, the Existing Homes Tax Credit was specifically-targeted to stimulate economic activity.

The Existing Home Tax Credit was a primary reason why my family decided to splurge $13,120 renovating our house with a new set of windows. In all honesty the Obama tax credit wasn’t the only reason why we made this large investment – also, I was really, really cold. You see, our home and all of its original windows were built in 1972 – a year when the Vietnam War was a-raging, Don McLean’s “American Pie” was at the top of the Billboard charts, Richard Nixon obliterated George McGovern in his re-election campaign and five Cuban men were arrested in an elaborate plot to bug the office of the Democratic National Committee. 1972 was also mere months before the OPEC embargo on the United States, the mother of all oil crises and the classical era of energy conservation.

38 years later the seals on our windows had broken, the wood frames had warped and in many places the entire panel had fallen off its tracks. In my room the windows had degraded so badly that I literally could not close them. My room had always been drafty through high school and college; in the summer this was never really so bad, but it was always a bit uncomfortable when the outside temperature had fallen below 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Now that my body is still struggling to adjust from the sweltering Malian Sahel, I felt that I could now submit to my father a quite-valid request to crank up the thermostat.

“For such an admirer of Jimmy Carter, you of all people should put on a sweater…”

“I am wearing a sweater – and a polar fleece and a jacket and a scarf and a hat. And when I sit in my room I can see my own breath. With all due respect to President Carter, our house in Vista is situated in a different climatic zone than his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia…”

And we agreed that maybe there exist even more effective, cost-efficient methods of heat retention than polar fleece. My dad and I gave an ample examination of each and every one of our house’s 25 windows and came to the conclusion that they were all past their expiration date. Every window in our house was broken beyond repair; the seals were broken, the cavities between the panes were full of condensation. The worst culprits were the bay windows along the wall of our dining room. Our heat vents were blowing 30 percent of our hot air right out the window! And likewise, since heating and cooling constitutes roughly half of our home energy consumption, at least $50 of the $341 we spend a month on our electric bill was being completely and unnecessarily wasted – we were throwing at least $600 out the window every year!

The root of the problem was in the fact that the original windows built in this house were made with wood frames. Wood can be fine for flooring, paneling, trim and furniture, but it is in many ways an archaic building material for window frames because wood warps, it cracks, it eventually decays and rots no matter how much protective varnish you paint it with. Even in a climate spared of termites, wooden windows are not meant to last much longer than a single generation in America (33 years in my family). If people want to live in homes made of wood that’s fine, but so long as the United States’ official housing policy is to promote home ownership, then we Americans have to grasp that home ownership entails the responsibility of conducting necessary maintenance, repairs, and gradual modernization – and if we are going to own houses made out of organic materials like wood then we have to continue more regular upkeep than we would if our houses were made solely out of concrete, brick, plastic and steel.

And just as it makes only perfect sense for our every next car be a hybrid or an electric, it’s time to make sure that we not let this crisis go to waste either. If we have to replace our windows, we are going to replace them with the most effective, the most durable, the highest quality windows on the market to cut down on the amount of energy we consume for heating and cooling. Maybe our Ben Affleck-aged, 2,400-square-foot house is too outdated to ever be LEED-certified, but we can at least remodel and renovate it into something that is significantly more energy-efficient, something that requires less consumption of fossil fuels and reduces our overall carbon footprint.

My dad decided to go with the recommendation of one of his friends and hired Thermo-Tite Windows – a small business of a few dozen employees based out of Port Chester, New York which sells the highest-graded window available on the market to private homeowners. Apparently, we learned that when we are buying new windows every 38 years or so we should ensure the quality of the products we purchase by checking the window performance rating issued by the National Fenestration Rating Council.

Every window worth its weight in sand should be affixed with an NFRC rating label detailing the following:

• U-factor - which measures how much energy material conducts.
• solar heat gain coefficient - which measures how well a product blocks heat cause by the sunlight.
• visible transmittance - which measures how much visible light comes through the glass.
• condensation resistance –which measures the window’s ability to resist condensation on the interior surface.

The problem with our 38-year-old double-paned windows was that all that sat between those panes was gas composed of the natural ratio between nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, carbon dioxide and argon found in Earth’s atmosphere.

“What is argon?” you might ask. Argon is a noble gas, element number 18. People usually do not give it much notice unless they are either engaged in the business of poultry asphyxiation, graphite production, titanium processing, filling up fluorescent light bulbs or windows. But people should give this noble gas the credit that it is due. Coming in third after only nitrogen (78.09%) and oxygen (20.95%), argon gas constitutes approximately 0.93% of the volume of Earth’s atmosphere; coming in fourth is the most prevalent greenhouse gas – carbon dioxide – which constitutes a mere 0.039%. Argon gas exhibits certain properties which allow us humans to utilize it in our manufacturing of windows in a way that reduces the prevalence of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we pump into our atmosphere.

In vintage Genesis-with-Peter Gabriel-Era windows like the ones we had in our house, naturally-occurring argon gas usually constitutes only 0.93% of the insulation. That’s a terrible waste of that fraction of that millimeter of space between the two panes of glass that could be easily filled with a plurality of argon gas – which conducts heat less efficiently than nitrogen or oxygen. When the Mason family’s climate-controlled home interior is set to 68 degrees and the portion of the atmosphere directly adjacent to the windows is 34 degrees, the basic laws of thermodynamics entail that heat will gradually transfer from the portion of the atmosphere inside our house to the atmosphere outside of our house. Hence despite the fact that we were setting our thermostat and consuming enough energy to heat the house to 68 degrees it felt closer to 58 or even 48 right next to the windows.

Now in the 2010s the Thermo-Tite Window Company is mass-marketing double-paned windows with enhanced argon content of the slight cavity between the two panes. Gaseous argon allows for significantly less heat conduction than gaseous nitrogen or oxygen – so the greater the ratios of argon to nitrogen and argon to oxygen in a given gaseous mixture, the slower it will conduct heat. Compared to windows filled with naturally-composed dry air, this argon-enhanced double-pane window reduces heat conductivity by roughly 30 percent.

In a temperate climate like New York, most families consume approximately 864 kilowatt/hours of energy and spend $95 month air-conditioning their home from May through August. Since heat can also be conducted from the hot summer air outside through your windows to the air-conditioned interior, windows like my old Thermopanes with a high U-factor are wasting about 30 percent of that energy or $29 of their monthly electric bills on air-conditioning which also effectively is lost through the windows. And those are only the economic windfalls of the windows’ reduced heat conductivity!

Argon-filled Thermo-Tite Windows also receive such high performance ratings from the National Fenestration Rating Council because of their solar heat gain coefficient, their visible transmittance, and the windows’ condensation resistance. These factors are also beneficial to my household’s bottom line, because homes are also inadvertently heated by the sunlight which passes through the double-paned windows – so windows marked by higher solar heat gain coefficients and lower visible transmittance are heated by unwanted solar radiation during the months when families are cranking the AC. A New York household that uses a central air conditioner 8 hours a day could reduce the amount of heat coming into their house via solar radiation and reduce the amount of energy that their air conditioning system needs to bring the house to their designated temperature.

In layman’s terms, Thermo-Tite’s windows are framed with special insulating fiberglass which reduces the chance of condensation forming on the inside of the two panes. Thermo-Tite’s silver oxide-coated windows reduce the amount of solar radiation that passes through the glass panes and argon cavity – and this reduces the amount of energy consumed on cooling houses in the summer, which is much less than that lost by conduction but a considerable amount of energy nonetheless. With such slight technological improvements in manufacturing these windows from making the frames out of durable steel, plastic and fiberglass instead of wood, coating the glass with silver dioxide and filling the space between the two panes with concentrated argon gas, we can prevent so much wasted energy consumption on cooling by about 30 to 35 percent. In New York we consume a much greater percentage of our annual energy bill on heating than cooling in comparison to a household in Texas or Arizona, but over the months and years the costs add up nonetheless.

Altogether, New Yorkers typically spend 50 percent of their overall utility bills - roughly $4,000 - on heating and air-conditioning. So if there is any way that we can reduce the amount of energy we consume on heating and air-conditioning our homes – even by just a fraction, it can eventually adds up to hundreds if not thousands of dollars in savings every year. That means that if the average family in New York were to replace their outdated air-filled double-paned windows with energy-efficient argon-filled double-panes, they could save an average $600 each year on their electric bills. So by investing in more energy-efficient windows and reducing their consumption of fossil-fuel-generated electricity, that average family in New York would save themselves the equivalent of their much-heralded rebate from the 2001 Bush tax cuts every single year from now until they move out of their current home.

More money saved on utility bills is more money the pockets of consumers – in terms of economic behavior, savings on utility bills has supply-side effects on consumer spending no less than a check in the mail from the U.S. Treasury. If anything, it is more effective than the ostentatiously-marketed supply-side stimulus of the Bush tax cuts because people are less likely to notice the money saved and put it in the bank and more likely to go out and spend it on better-quality food at the supermarket, a new jacket at the department store, dinner and a movie with their girlfriend or a round of beers for all of their friends at the bar. Instead of spending money on oil imported from the Middle East, people who improve the energy-efficiency of their homes are now freed to spend that money on goods and services produced here in the United States.

A free market purist would argue that every consumer in America should simply be educated about the economics of energy consumption and the science of argon-filled windows and they should be able to decide upon such a clearly money-saving investment by their own reason and free will. Maybe my parents would have replaced the drafty windows in my room simply because it was so cold that I could see my breath at night. But what really prodded them to make this decision was the Obama administration’s $1,500 home weatherization tax credit.

After my dad and I inspected all of our broken, leaking 38-year-old windows, we did the math and calculated that to hire Thermo-Tite to replace every one of them would cost $13,120. But thanks to the tax credit, it would really only cost us $11,620 – still a significant sum, but a much more manageable one. Though we live in a relatively large 2,400-square-foot house, so we consume more energy on climatisation. by investing in more energy-efficient windows alone we should save approximately $50 month on our electric bills

Thanks to the Obama administration’s tax credit, we decided to pay Thermo-Tite Windows for $13,120 worth of argon-filled double-pane windows, insulated frames and installation. Our $13,120 went towards the windows themselves – which were manufactured in New Jersey, the Thermo-Tite company headquartered in Port Chester, New York, and the subcontracted carpenters who live throughout the Hudson Valley. And when the work was done we gave each one of the carpenters a $20 tip. The home weatherization tax credit spurred us to take $13,220 that would have otherwise laid fallow in the bank and to spend it on goods and services right here at home.

…And those window manufacturers in New Jersey and the management in Port Chester and the carpenters from Wappinger’s Falls are going to take the money they earned from us and spend it at the supermarket, at the movie theater, on Christmas gifts for their wives and their children. And that money in the pockets of working class households who need it the most is going to create more demand for more goods and more services and more jobs as it continues circulating and multiplying throughout the economy. From personal observation, I can tell you that the Existing Homes Tax Credit was the deciding factor in my family’s decision to put $13,220 into the economy – and all of this additional spending cost the U.S. Treasury only $1,500 in tax deductions. And the window-makers, carpenters and management are going to pay more income taxes, that extra money circulating and multiplying is going to generate sales taxes, thus the federal and state governments are going to reduce their deficits with more tax revenue.

The grant and tax incentive policies have received criticism over the past year as they have grossly underperformed the Obama administration benchmark of weatherizing 600,000 homes by March 2010. Vice President Biden came to in Manchester, New Hampshire to celebrate the weatherization of the 200,000th home on August 27th. At the current trajectory, the Energy Department will probably announce the 600,000th home improvement paid for with the Weatherization Assistance Program sometime in the sequel Recovery Summer 2011.

A March 2010 article by Garance Burke in the Boston Globe panned the weatherization measures of the Obama stimulus, noting that a year after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed by President Obama “the stimulus program has retrofitted 30,250 homes – about 5 percent of the overall goal – and fallen well short of the 87,000 jobs that the department planned.” Burke emphasized individual instances of inactivity as poster-children for the WAP grants’ ineffectuality;

“In Indiana, state-trained workers flubbed insulation jobs. In Alaska, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, the program has yet to produce a single job or retrofit one home. And in California, a state with nearly 37 million residents, the program at last count had created 84 jobs.”

Burke and other critics are correct to point out the inconvenient truth that this one of the Obama administration’s signature job creation policies has lagged in meeting its expectations on time. However, they are misguided in asserting that this lag in job creation has been due to any inherent fault in the structure of the Weatherization Assistance Program or the extension of the Existing Homes Tax Credit. One of the primary reasons why the home weatherization policies have yet to live up to the Obama administration’s projected job creation numbers has been because the Recovery Act was designed so that most of the stimulus funds would be spent by the individual states – and for one reason or another, the individual states have not administered the home weatherization programs that these grants are meant to fund.

The weatherization program has underperformed nationally because it has underperformed disproportionately in states like Alaska, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina where the rock-ribbed Republican state governments are ideologically opposed to implementing President Obama’s stimulus policy. "We can't accept the bait," said Sarah Palin - then-Governor of Alaska. "It's a bribe - it's 'here, take these dollars - but you gotta grow your government.'" In addition to federal grants to pay for home weatherization, Governor Palin rejected energy efficiency grants, immunizations, air quality grants, emergency food assistance, homeless grants, senior meals, child care development grants, nutrition programs, homeless grants, arts, unemployment services, air quality, justice assistance grants and other programs allocated to Alaska. Surely if we are to caste blame for the disappointing track record of the home weatherization grants and tax credits in states like Alaska, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina, we should be pointing our fingers at GOP Governors like Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Haley Barbour, Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford who have sacrificed the weatherization grants which would greatly benefit their constituents on the altars of national ticket ambitions.

Other states like California have fared so badly implementing their share of the Recovery Act’s stimulus funds because not because their Governors were more interested in political grandstanding but because their hands have been tied by sheer political gridlock. Though Governor Schwarzenegger had been an outspoken proponent of the Obama administration’s home weatherization policies in his state, California has been largely unable to implement stimulus projects because the state government is undergoing such a budget crisis has slashed public employees to such austere extremes – Governor Schwarzenegger has asked state employees to take voluntary “Furlough Fridays” – that the state can hardly cash their Weatherization Assistance Program grants let alone establish and conduct a brand new state housing program.

However, the opposite is true in Massachusetts – which is perfectly on schedule with spending its $122 million in WAP grants by the U.S. Energy Department’s March 2012 deadline. As of May, the Commonwealth had insulated 2,845 units of private housing, employing 42 new contractors and 220 new installers. The Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development has also awarded more than $10 million to 20 local housing authorities to weatherize the state’s 50,000 public housing units and replace their outdated, inefficient heating systems – with material procurement and installation happening as you read this blog. The primary reason why the Obama administration’s weatherization grants have been so consequential in Massachusetts while they have been faltering elsewhere is that under Governor Deval Patrick Massachusetts already had a established a functioning home weatherization program of its own albeit with a much smaller budget. When the Recovery Act’s WAP grants were allocated to the respective state governments, Massachusetts did not have to waste time with HR issues and was able to hit the ground running.

The Weatherization Assistance Program has yet to meet its job creation in the immediate short run perhaps because state-administered home weatherization programs are not as “shovel-ready” as federal highway spending or aid to the states to retain public school teachers, police officers. Nevertheless, as of Joe Biden’s August commemoration of the 200,000th weatherization of a private home with federal stimulus dollars, despite the delays and setbacks experienced in some of the largest states, this program had created approximately 13,000 jobs for plumbers, carpenters, electricians, welders and other assorted craftsmen. As states are picking up the pace, tens of thousands more jobs are projected to be generated by the modest $5 billion Weatherization Assistance Program.

An unfortunate matter for the Obama administration and other cheerleaders of Keynesian spending is that there exists hardly an iota of data available on the Existing Home Tax Credit for economists and public policy experts to parse. Homeowners were only able to begin making tax deductions on money they invested in energy-efficient retrofitting beginning as of Tax Day 2010 – so it would be fair to say that with the notable exception of professional policy analysts the vast majority of taxpayers did not feel this incentive until this year. Until we have conclusive numbers from the Departments of Treasury on how many people actually took this tax deduction, we can’t really know how much it costs because its expenditure is perfectly conditional on the degree to which people respond to this incentive, until we have employment statistics through December we can’t know how many jobs it created, and until we have statistics from the Department of Energy we can’t project how much they are going to reduce U.S. energy consumption and emission of greenhouse gases.

This whole matter of home weatherization is anything but a campaign of feel-good activism – it is a serious policy to spur economic growth and recovery. As far as tax cuts go, the Existing Homes Tax Credit is remarkably cost-efficient because there are no public monies being wasted on just throwing tax cuts at everyone with the hope that some of it might stick. The carrot of the tax credit is perfectly contingent on actual spending, so if you weatherize your house and actually put money into the economy you receive a tax credit, if you don’t you get nothing and the deficit is no worse as a result. No public monies are frittered on idle speculation, stagnant saving or wasteful consumption– the cost to the Treasury of this particular tax credit is directly offset by consumer investment which stimulates demand for domestically-produced goods and services and spurs employment for working class and middle class Americans. Since home heating and cooling costs are disproportionate strains on the pocketbooks of those working class and middle class families who can afford them the least, this tax credit is remarkably progressive – while at the same it remains egalitarian as higher-income families like my own can benefit from saving on energy bills all the same.

If my parents were to live in this house indefinitely then their investment in energy efficiency would pay for itself with savings on home heating and cooling bills after approximately 19 years; assuming that my parents still live in this house into their 70s then sometime around the year 2029 they would have an additional $4,800 every year to splurge on vacation, invest on the stock market, tuck away in their savings account, or do whatever their hearts desire with the windfall of real energy savings. Though by that time they Dan and Sue Mason will more likely have sold their present house and retired to Vermont or the Berkshires; they will nevertheless benefit because they will be able to sell this property for a higher price – not because of idle speculation on the real estate market but because they have invested in the real value of their home. Whichever way you look at it, the home weatherization tax credit will in the long run foster greater savings, investment and spending on goods and services produced in America, it could help revive the real value of property on the real estate market and should be a boon to the financial interests of homeowners, landlords and renters alike.

However, like the Bush tax cuts the extension of the Existing Homes Tax Credit is set to expire on December 31st of this year. Rich Neale, a sales representative for Thermo-Tite Windows says “We’ll still have jobs here and there, but a good portion of our business comes from customers are deciding to weatherize their windows solely because of the tax incentive. We’re afraid that at the end of the year our business is going to dry up.”

As Congress deliberates on which tax cuts to extend and which to let expire, the Existing Homes Tax Credit must not be overlooked. This directly targeted tax incentive stimulates economic activity and fosters job creation more cost-effectively than blanket reductions of the income tax, capital gains and dividends tax, and especially the inheritance tax. Moreover, these tax credits estimated to be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars and their $5 billion public spending counterparts are relatively modest and affordable. Not all tax cuts serve as incentives for private sector growth the same way, some tax cuts are simply better fiscal policies than others, and there is no compelling economic argument that the gargantuan, ineffective, regressive boondoggles of the Bush tax cuts should be renewed but the modest, cost-effective, job-creating Existing Homes Tax Credit should be allowed to expire.

From my perspective, this is a no-brainer.

The Future is Here

2010-11-24T11:02:00.001-08:00

Now that the clunker of a Jeep Wrangler has been traded for a hyper-efficient Toyota Prius, I’ve been in awe of modern Japanese technology. Being eternally vigilant of keeping my smug emissions to a minimum, I can only heap praise upon the ultra-light, aerodynamic, hybrid-electric which stands as the most fuel-efficient gasoline-consuming automobile ever mass-produced thusfar in the history of human civilization.

It is a pleasure to drive, the built-in GPS and rear-monitor make driving and parking incredibly easier, and with an average of 48 miles per gallon on highways and 51 miles per gallon in cities I hardly ever have to fill up for gas. When I drove the Wrangler I could hardly drive from Vista to Vermont without having to fill the tank, but on a recent road trip I was able to drive the Prius from Amherst, Massachusetts to Alexandria, Virginia – a total of 8.5 hours and 401 miles – without having to stop for gas! And if that weren’t good enough, it only cost me $29 because the Prius gas tank is so small to begin with! Forget about carbon emissions; the expense of this car will eventually pay for itself in savings on gasoline consumption!

Though it is the most fuel-efficient car on the market, the Prius isn’t necessarily the superlative most cost-efficient when it comes to fuel consumption. Though the Prius II gets 48/51 miles per gallon it costs a whopping $22,800 – whereas the Honda Civic gets a mere 40/43 mpg it also costs only $15,800. Of course, if private consumers as well as policymakers in business and government are trying to figure out ways of minimizing CO2 emissions, they should focus more on those models that can reduce fuel consumption the most cost-efficiently. Hybrid vehicles are only going to be practical solutions to the macroeconomic issues of air pollution and climate change when they are sold at a price that not just the sons of doctors and real estate brokers but also middle-class and working-class consumers can afford such an unwieldy investment.

So the other day I was driving around doing errands when I stopped in a parking garage and saw something which put my puny Prius to shame: a Tesla Roadster.

I was just dumbstruck standing there for what must’ve been five minutes admiring this beautiful, sleek and unarguably sexy car as though it were Lea Michele posing there in the parking garage in lingerie and stilettos… (drool)…

And this Jamaican delivery guy parks next to me, sees me and laughs a good hearty belly laugh, “Ho ho ho! Dis electreec ca! De man paks his electreec ca hea every day! It ees de Futah!”

“Yeah… I know…”

“You know how much money I spen’ on gas? Hundreds and hundreds o’ dollas every week! If I had an electreec ca I could deeliver my packages and not spend no money! I’d just plug eet in and feell eet with electreecity!”

And for the rest of the day, I couldn’t help but think of that Jamaican dude in the parking garage. In all probability this guy making $15,000-$20,000 a year can’t afford to go out and buy a Tesla Roadster. And he’s probably not in line to buy one of the first Chevy Volts for $32,780 or one of the Nissan Leafs for $25,280. But what if one day five, ten, twenty years from now the Volt or the Leaf or one of their progeny is produced on such a scale that he can afford to buy one?

These electric cars are being marketed as being able to run on $1.50 worth of electricity per day. If you can charge your car up at home or at the office then the cost would just be added to your overall utility bill – but a great deal of commuters who need to drive long distances every day would need to be able to recharge at private recharging stations en route. A small business owner like a package deliverer, a carpenter, a cable repairman or Joe the Plumber who drives from house to house for business might have to recharge multiple times every work day! And of course, no country has ever had a full-scale economy of electric-charging stations and we can only speculate as to how this hypothetical market is going to function.

But could the recharging of electric cars really cost only $1.50 per day – even for someone like the Jamaican delivery guy whose job consists of driving around town all day long? And wouldn’t charging a commuter fleet only be adding to the burden of our already-strained electric grids? Maybe in a market along the swaths of California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas desert that will soon be electrified exclusively with solar and wind energy a fleet of electric cars could have a miniscule carbon footprint - but here in New York where so much of our electricity is derived from oil, coal and gas of course electric cars would only have a marginal effect on reducing our greenhouse emissions for staving off the most disastrous global climate change. Electric cars could have only modest improvements on our environmental degradation in a cloudy region like New York without a massive reinvention of our energy grid - which for now remains untold generations away, so they can really only be rationally superior products in this market if they offer genuine economic benefits in terms of saving on transportation costs.

I must concede my own ignorance on the matter – and beseech you all in the peanut gallery for some answers. At the moment I’m only tangentially interested in electric cars in terms of air pollution or carbon emissions – I'm much more interested in the potential for electric cars to improve the traditional indicators in our economy. If a typical commuter who drives from, say, the suburbs of Westchester County to Madison Avenue five days a week were to drive a Tesla Roadster, a Chevy Volt or a Nissan Leaf, how much money would he be saving on gas? In the case of the Jamaican delivery guy who is driving not just as a commuter but as an operating cost of his business, how lucrative would his investment in a Volt be over the course of 10 years? Is this fuel-saving technology something that could help small businesses stay afloat in this perilous economy – and if so, to what degree? Could it help small and large firms save so much money on gas that they could actually afford to invest and expand their production and start making new hires? And considering that many of these cars are going to be manufactured here in the United States and they will be using less Middle Eastern oil, how will the growth of electric cars effect our trade deficits? Can the gradual conversion from a fleet of gasoline-fueled cars and trucks to vehicles powered by electric batteries contribute to the overall solvency of the United States economy?

If any of you can find any good data on the economic benefits of electric cars – or even just personal anecdotes or musings on your own household budget, I would much appreciate it. Here’s to making Zacstravaganza more of a two-way conversation in the new year!

$20 and a Goat

2010-11-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

(With my apologies to those who already know it ends, I have recently rewritten what remains perhaps the greatest story that has ever happened in the history of Zachary Asher Mason. The Assassination of James Brown is now my case for why I want to go to law school to study property, torts and international law. At the very least, I'd like to hope that it makes my application a memorable read.)

While I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the African nation of Mali, I found that “property” and “property rights” were very nebulous concepts. Every man in the Minianka tribe with whom I lived had his own plot of land over which he had exclusive claim to farm – but the fields were demarcated only by the whims of the village chief. Every man was the undisputable owner of the millet he harvested – but the Miniankas believe that it is every man’s obligation to share his food with his fellow clansmen. Property rights did exist in Minianka culture, but if one man had it and another man believed that he deserved it then who had the right to use that property was up for debate.

My interest in the law was piqued when a twist of fate required that I argue a case of property rights before the Minianka tribal elders. I came to the elder council believing that the facts of my case were very straightforward; I owned a cat upon which I bestowed the name James, and this cat was my sovereign property. One night my cat ventured beyond the realm of my chain-link fence and scaled the wall of the clinic across the street. At this clinic stood a night watchman armed with a shotgun to deter the theft of the village’s valuable stores of medicine, and he had a history of abusing his position by shooting neighborhood cats and feeding them to his deeply-impoverished, malnourished family. This one night the watchman decided to shoot my cat James, chop its head off, skin it and feed it to his family for dinner.

Upon discovering this act the next morning, I considered myself a victim of great wrongdoing and demanded restitution. In Minianka society it was considered a greater affront than the crime itself for one to press charges with the formal law enforcement agencies, for after 80 years of Colonialism and 32 years of dictatorship this culture has nurtured a deep-seated distrust of the state. Instead, the Miniankas resolve all of their conflicts within the informal system of the chief of the village and the traditional elder council. And so I petitioned the chief of the village for a redress of my grievances. My argument came in two parts.

As for the charge of livestock theft, I based my claim on the facts that my cat was an article of livestock property and that I had paid 10,000 francs for this cat and its vaccinations. I argued that since the night watchman killed the cat and ate it, he was thereby unable to return my cat in its original form and thus he had violated my sovereign property rights. Therefore, I contended, the night watchman should pay me 10,000 francs so that I could buy and vaccinate a new cat to replace the one he had destroyed.

Moreover, I contended that the night watchman had committed reckless endangerment by discharging a Colonial-era musket mere meters from the garden where I was then sleeping in my tent. I was concerned that if he had missed my cat he might have hit me with a bullet from his highly inaccurate musket. I made the case that I would not be content with a mere financial settlement equivalent to the property that I had lost, for I was concerned that on a later date the night watchman might be perfectly content to shoot at another cat and simply pay me after the fact. Since I did not press formal criminal charges before the Commandant, I demanded that the night watchman also pay me a goat in civil damages.

In the traditional Minianka legal system the defendant is entitled to make his argument too, and in this case the defendant asserted a novel defense. The night watchman conceded that he did in fact kill my cat, but he argued that he had no choice. “Evil sorcerers cast black magic spells to curse people with sickness, and evil sorcerers can take the form of animals”, he reasoned, “and so when I saw this cat approach the clinic wall, I had no means of knowing whether or not it was an evil sorcerer disguised as a cat. Therefore, as I was afraid for my own life, I determined that I had no choice but to shoot this cat as an act of self-defense.”

The village chief found in my favor for my claim for restitution for my property, but he acquitted the night watchman under the charge of reckless endangerment; “The night watchman raises a good point; what if your cat had been an evil sorcerer?” I erred in the way that I formed my case because I articulated an entirely Western sense of justice, and I did not consider that the village chief himself was a product of a society that is sincerely afraid of witchcraft.

Despite the fact that my first experience arguing a case resulted in such a disappointing verdict, I came away more determined than ever to pursue a career in law. Knowing what it means to suffer a loss, I want to be able to defend people’s property rights in a modern court of law. Now that I know the true meaning of injustice, I want to be able to right these kinds of wrongs and make such an airtight case that not even the most partial judge could reject it.

In particular, I intend to study international law so that I can represent American citizens and firms conducting business overseas. When Americans are in foreign countries to do work, at some point they are going to have to write contracts and obtain licenses from the pertinent regulatory agencies. As I have learned from personal experience, when disputes arise with host country nationals American firms are going to need legal representation to make their case before foreign tribunals within the framework of the local laws, customs and beliefs. That is why I would like to study the principles of justice as they are codified in the laws of the United States and be able to compare them to the laws of the State of Qatar, the Kingdom of Morocco and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan – as well as the customs of societies like the Miniankas who resolve their conflicts through informal institutions.

I want to pursue a career in law because I hope to be able to use my legal education in countries like Mali not just to protect American expatriates’ property in their beloved cats but to also protect Bambara farmers’ property in goats and Fulani pastoralists’ savings in cattle. The law must protect property rights in order to facilitate business growth and development in countries like Mali not just so that Americans can profit – but also so that people like the night watchman might be able to afford to buy more food, medicine and clothing for their families. I hope that I can use the power of the law to advance the cause of justice, because the sound practice of law should protect the rights of all property owners and foster an economy that thrives to such an extent that no family goes malnourished.