Freedom Blocked at the “Freedom 250” Grand Prix

The Indy Car Series event, held on August 23, 2026 in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence by delegates from the British colonies then officially in rebellion, ironically gave people visiting or living in the federal capitol a visceral experience of freedom blocked by governmental police and military authority. For not only the Mall, but also the entire route of the race was blocked by military and local police during the race such that public viewing was blocked. Entire city blocks separated the route from where tourists and local residents alike could drive and walk. Whether the federal government excessively pushed security at the expense of Americans being able to view the race without the luck of a lottery draw in advance for a ticket to be able to see the race at the Mall (roughly, between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument) is one question; the irony of being in such a visual, even overwhelming, militaristic police-city during a celebration of political freedom is more definite.

The full essay is at "Freedom 250."

Iran’s Theocracy: An Uneasy Fusion of Religion and Political Economy

As mass protests erupted in Iran during the second week of January, 2026, Iran’s theocracy was on edge. That the protests stemmed from the dire economic conditions facing the people amid staggering inflation, including on basic food staples, rather than from foreign affairs, raises the question of whether religious clergy, including the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are competent in making economic policy. Without the ongoing political pressure that can come from constituents in a representative democracy, or republic, it is no surprise that the protests in Iran quickly became mass riots. In other words, bad economic policy by religious clerics in power in an autocracy can easily result in popular protests abruptly erupting into rioting. The overreaching of functionaries based in the domain of religion into politics (including economic policy), such that the distinctiveness of the two domains is ignored or obfuscated, can be distinguished from the problems that go with autocracy.

The full essay is at "Iran's Theocracy."

Insulting Police in Georgia: Totalitarianism Criminalizing Politics

Whereas the Georgia in North America has been a member-state of the U.S. from that union’s beginning, the Georgia in Europe was still not annexed by the E.U. slightly more than 30 years after that Union’s beginning. Whether to join an empire-scale union of states is a political decision, as a union of states is a political animal. When a prospective state government criminalizes political protest and public discourse on that decision, such a government violates the federal requirement that the state governments adhere to democratic principles, which exclude criminalizing the political opposition. The government of Georgia in Europe crossed this line when a politician of the opposition was arrested for insulting the state police.

The full essay is at "Insulting Police in Georgia."

Corporate Governance and Political Activism: The Case of Ben & Jerry's

When a company’s management decides to take a partisan position publicly on a political issue, especially one that is contentious, decreased revenue, whether from potential or actual consumers individually who disagree with the company’s position, or from an organized boycott from groups that stand against the position. Anger may be a stronger motivator than ideological agreement, in which case any increase in purchases would be less than the lost revenue. This asymmetry itself is interesting from the standpoint of human nature, and strongly suggests that CEO’s steer their respective companies, which managements operate on behalf of the stockholders anyway, away from taking controversial positions on social or political issues that do not directly and significantly pertain to the bottom-line (i.e., profitability) in the short- or medium-term. In short, wading into societal issues is, generally speaking, not good for business. What then about a company like the ice-cream manufacturer, Ben & Jerry’s, which from its inception had social/political activism as a salient part of the company’s mission?

The full essay is at "Corporate Governance and Political Activism."

Democracy Waning in Former French Colonies in Africa

The subversion of democracy in former French colonies in Africa stymies the African Union from developing from a mere confederation, wherein all of the governmental sovereignty resides with the states, to modern federalism, whose chief characteristic is dual sovereignty. There is good reason for the requirement in the U.S. that the states be republics rather than dictatorships, for the latter would be more likely to ignore the federal jurisdiction within their respective states.

The full essay is at "Democracy Waning in Africa."

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Caves in on a Proposed Extradition Law: Yielded to the Street, Business, or Beijing?

Facing huge violent protests, Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous region of China, decided on June 15, to indefinitely suspend her proposal to open extradition to mainland China and Taiwan. As the Chinese government demonstrated during the protests at Tiananmen Square decades earlier, holding a mass protest in China was not among the ways to impeded proposed legislation. Why, then, did Lam seem to cave into the popular protests in Hong Kong?

The full essay is at "Hong Kong's Chief Executive."

Before Infiltrating American Democracy, the Kremlin Had Curtailed Democracy (and Federalism) in Russia

Officials in the Russian government may have ordered computer hackers to infiltrate the U.S. presidential election in 2016 not only in order to influence the outcome to be more favorable to Russia, but also because those officials did not respect federalism and democracy, which, after all, had been so weak in Russia. 

The full essay is at "Russia's Kremlin: Disvaluing Democracy."  

An Empire's Economic Scale Demands a Market System: The Case of China

A trend of increased-scale economies can be observed through history as city-states have given way to the increased military power of centralized Medieval kingdoms. Many of those expanded into Early Modern kingdoms as advances in military technology make it possible for kings to extend the territory under their control. Even empires have gotten bigger. Modern-day Germany was once considered an empire, as were Switzerland and the Netherlands. Today these polities are states in a modern form of empire, the EU. Similarly, the emergent United Colonies of America was considered to be an empire within the British Empire, with the individual colonies being viewed on both sides of the Atlantic as Early Modern kingdom-level polities on par with the states of the E.U. in the twentieth century. Similarly in China, as kingdoms were added, an old form of empire took shape. Because these enlargements came about gradually over centuries, it has been difficult for the human mind to recalibrate how the modern large empire-scale economies should be designed to take into effect the distinct challenges of the scale. We can see such an adjustment in the case of China as economic centralization came to be replaced by regulated markets, albeit with a sizeable involvement still of the government in the economy. 

The Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty. He ruled for 60 years, greatly expanding the size of the empire. (Source: Chinahighlights.com)

The full essay is at "The Case of China."

Egyptian Court Overreached in Declaring a Legislature to be Unconstitutional

In 1803, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Madison v. Marbury, which established the authority of the court to declare a law to be unconstitutional, and thus invalid. A basic principle underlying this authority is that a constitution is on a level superior to a statute. An entity established in a constitution to interpret it can thus invalidate a law passed by another body established in the constitution. Invalidating that other body itself would be an entirely different matter, as it would involve one constitutional body dissolving another of equivalent grounding. Accordingly, the constitutional court in Egypt overreached on June 14, 2012 in declaring the parliament dissolved.

The full essay is at "Egyptian Court Overreached."

Occupying Wall Street: A Self-Regulated Protest?

The right to protest as a manifestation of freedom of speech is held societally as sacred the United States, but the question of how far protest goes before it becomes simply living in a park is one of those gray areas that tend to be decided by the judiciary far from the tarps and sleeping bags. The protesters’ premise that living in a public space eventuates in the achievement of their goals is tenuous where the goals are broad. Undergoing a hunger strike to get a certain anti-corruption bill voted on by India’s parliament is far different than camping out in Zuccotti Park in New York City until corporate capitalism is ended in the U.S. In short, the tactics used should be oriented to the sort of objective being sought. Moreover, the tactics and indeed the objectives themselves require a protest group to self-police such that it does not wander too far off course or spread itself too thin. Protest movements may be too prone to die a slow death from self-inflicted wounds without even the slightest recognition of the cause of death. The Occupy Wall Street protest movement had the capacity to self-regulate, but fell well short of that which was necessary for the group to achieve its anti-corporate goals.

The full essay is at "Occupy Wall Street Protests." 

Autocratic Regimes: Subject to the Domino Effect?

"In Beirut, gunfire broke out and crowds of people waved Egyptian flags. In Yemen, they gathered in front of the Egyptian Embassy chanting, 'Wake up rulers, Mubarak fell today.' In Gaza, they fired shots in the air and set off fireworks. . . . [However,] in a telling sign of the divide between the rulers and the ruled, the region’s leaders, presidents and monarchs remained largely silent." This depiction by The New York Times of ripple effects across the Middle East in the wake of the resignation of Egypt's Mubarak in February, 2011 intimates the hoped-for and feared possibility that the popular unrest could spread.  Moreover, the entire world, which had been been glued to the events unfolding in Cairo, wondered if a domino effect might be in store in countries under autocratic rule. Indeed, The New York Times wrote of a possible domino effect quite explicitly: "The popular uprising that started . . . in Tunisa had claimed its second autocratic government, this time in the largest country in the Arab world. With more protests planned in coming days, some governments were clearly worried they could be next." But do autocratic governments fall like dominos?  That is, is revolution contagious? 

The full essay is at "Autocratic Regimes."

Knee-Jerk Reactions: On the U.S. Government Enabling Dictators

While in the U.S. Senate, Paul Kirk, the interim U.S. Senator who took Ted Kennedy’s seat, said, “Without a legitimate and credible Afghan partner, that counterinsurgency strategy is fundamentally flawed. The current Afghan government is neither legitimate nor credible. . . . We should not send a single additional dollar in aid or add a single American serviceman or woman to the 68,000 already courageously deployed in Afghanistan until we see a meaningful move by the Karzai regime to root out its corruption.” 

The full essay is at "Enabling Dictators."

Democratic Protests in the Middle East: A Conflagration of Historic Proportions amid a Constancy in Human Nature?

Perhaps by looking back on one's own time as though it were already historical, it is possible to assess whether what one is witnessing on the global stage is truly significant from the standpoint of human history or merely of that which history is replete. In the context of the popular protests in the Middle East in early 2011, the question is perhaps whether the world was witnessing a Hegelian burst of freedom or merely more of the same in terms of political revolutions.

The full essay is at "Democratic Protests in the Middle East."

Syria: From Protests to War

In the midst of all of the excitement and exuberance of a political protest, the protesters themselves in Syria were probably not thinking of the future of bloodshed that would ensue as Syria slid into full-blown civil war in 2011. As with most civil wars, civilians, even children, have not been immune from paying the price. On July 20, 2013, for example, government forces besieged the town of Saraqeb, striking it with rockets and tank fire, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.[1] The following day, Assad’s forces fired mortar rounds into a main market in the town of Ariha, killing at least 20 civilians.[2] Without doubt, the protesters during the Arab Spring in Syria could hardly have foreseen all the bloodshed. Had they known, it is not a sure thing that they would have or even should have gone ahead with the protests.
 
The contrast from taking time off work to join a protest march on a sunny day to finding one’s home destroyed and relatives dead in the rubble cannot be overstated. An ocean of time separates mouthing abstract democratic platitudes with friends and finding oneself in a world of hunger, fear and death. It is also difficult to relate the primped world of seasoned politics to the stygian hell of war. Yet politics and war are both about power and civic conflict. It can take surprisingly little for the civilized conflict in legislative chambers over power to break down into force and violence. The question is perhaps whether moving to democracy in an authoritarian state can be accomplished without giving violence the upper hand.

                                                                        After the Protests

                                                       A Syrian boy is being pulled out of the rubble of his house in Saraqeb.  Source: Getty

 

Put another way, protesting authoritarian rule on behalf of democratic principles is not something that should be taken lightly. In considering the full weight that such protests can have, the adults are making a decisive judgment for not only themselves, but also the children who would not be immune from the horrors of war. This is not to say that being willing to stand up for freedom is not worth it. Rather, it is to say that the implications ought not to be downplayed or even ignored in assessing at the outset whether launching protests to directly confront a ruthless dictator is the best means of ushering in democracy. People having a lot of power do not tend to give it up willingly, and they have the means to protect it by harming those people who would take it away.

See the video that complements this essay: http://youtu.be/NJm3ZaamhgA

 

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1. Barbara Surk, “Syrian Army Bombs Northern Rebel Town of Saraqeb, Children Among the Dead,” The Huffington Post, July 20, 2013. 2. Jamal Halaby and Zeina Karam, “Syria Violence: Assad Forces Kill At Least 20 Civilians in Ariah, Dozens of Rebels Near Damascus,” The Huffington Post, July 21, 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

Futility of a League: Arab Action against Assad

With observers on the ground in Syrian cities, the Arab League conceded at the beginning of 2012 that the monitors had “failed to halt the lethal violence” in Syria.[1] Nabil Al Arabi, the organization’s chair, acknowledged that snipers persisted in major cities, but that the allegiance of the shooters had not been ascertained. Such cautiousness was itself likely a contributor to what the Journal refers to as “pitfalls of the organization’s self-reinvention as a regional diplomatic playmaker.”[2] Criticism had been mounting that the “monitoring mission has done little to resolve a conflict that the United Nations [estimated at the time had] taken more than 5,000 mostly civilian lives. Perhaps this might be an indication of the snipers’ allegiance.

The full essay is at "Futility of a League." 

1.  Matt Bradley and Nour Malas, “Arab World Diplomacy Fails to Stop Syria Clash,” The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2011. 

2. Ibid.