The Emperor has no clothes. But does it matter that he’s naked in public?

As the $1.9 trillion federal stimulus bears down on us, forgive me for saying aloud what you’ve suspected all along. Deep down, you’ve always known that America was never going to repay its $28,000,000,000,000 national debt. Like, when push came to shove, you knew that’d be impossible. And why question yet another stimulus check when there’s such a vital need?

But for those who’ve never considered the breathtaking fraud of our global financial system — or, for those who have considered it and now fear it’s all about to come crashing down — let me explain what’s really going on. Fortunately, your anxiety is misplaced; by the time our national debt becomes something to worry about, you’re going to have a lot more to worry about.

Conjure in your mind that mid-1700s colonial society wherein a farmer seeks to buy a pair of wool socks from the local tailor. The farmer barters for the wool socks with a block of his cheese, and the tailor — who really likes cheese — agrees to the trade. But, there’s a caveat (because there’s always a caveat with tailors, am I right?)

“It takes me more time to make socks than it takes you to make cheese,” the tailor says, pretentiously. “And because it’s more of a hassle for me to obtain wool, spin it to yarn, and expertly weave it into a pair of socks than it is for you to just let some milk curdle, then” — and here the tailor makes his move — “if you want this pair of wool socks, you’ll have to give me two blocks of your cheese.”

“But I haven’t got a second block of cheese,” the farmer protests.

“Oh,” the Tailor replies. “Then you can’t have my socks.”

“But it’s cold outside,” the farmer wails. 

“Tell you what,” the tailor responds, mercifully. “I’ll give you this pair of wool socks now in exchange for a single block of cheese, but — you owe me that second block of cheese within a month.”

The farmer gleefully agrees to his debt-financed part of the deal, walking off with both a pair of wool socks and an obligation to deliver unto the tailor a second block of cheese. Meanwhile, the tailor gets a block of cheese plus an “IOU” good for a second one within 30 days. Transaction complete.

What I’ve just described is the type of transaction that’s defined most of historical commerce (or, so goes the ubiquitous myth). In societies where a money system evolved, those little coins or paper instruments served merely to make more efficient the process of trade. A standardized “worth” to money enabled a transaction’s participants to easily assign a value to goods and services that eliminated the imprecision of on-the-spot bartering. 

So adapting the prior farmer/tailor example, instead of having to equalize the transaction via a promise of later payment, the “inherent” value of the products can be instantaneously reflected in the medium of exchange: The farmer buys a pair of socks from the tailor for $10, and then — separately — sells him a block of cheese for $5. Two transactions, complete. 

But now let’s presume that the farmer has neither cash nor a second block of cheese, yet still really needs those socks. 

“That’s OK,” the tailor says. “Take the $10 socks now, give me your $5 block of cheese, and pay me the remaining $5 later. But for the luxury of paying me later, I’m going to charge you an extra $1 per month until you fully pay me.” The farmer happily obtains his socks, plus a debt — with interest.

That’s how the modern economy works. Soon enough — after a few such transactions — the farmer owes the tailor $28 trillion. 

Now: Let’s examine America’s present-day $28 trillion global debt, because just as the farmer can’t possibly repay his debt, neither can America. And that compels the question of whether the tailor should have expected to be repaid in the first place.

The tailor likes cheese. Like, a lot. And although he wanted to be paid more than the farmer could give him at the time of the transaction, he was nonetheless willing to part with his handcrafted socks for less than their stated value. Sure, he bargained to be paid more later, he expected to be paid more later, yet he still nonetheless agreed to part with his socks in that moment for the price that the farmer could then pay. 

At any time during their several subsequent exchanges, the tailor could have stopped trading pairs of wool socks for blocks of cheese — but his cheese habit compelled him to keep parting with his socks in exchange for whatever cheese the farmer could offer (plus that increasingly suspect promise to pay the balance later). 

So: Was a pair of wool socks truly worth two blocks of cheese, given that the tailor was so consistently willing to part with them — in practice, in that moment — for only one block of cheese?

Unsurprisingly, the farmer eventually comes back and says, “Sorry T, turns out I’m destitute, and thus can’t give you all those second blocks of cheese I previously promised you.”

Whatever. The fact remains that, while the tailor had anticipated receiving the cheese he was rightfully owed, his belly had still been filled with that which had made parting with his socks worth it to him at the time.

Sure, had the tailor known he ultimately wouldn’t be paid the full amount of the debt, maybe he wouldn’t have sold the farmer his wool socks — but that would’ve meant forfeiting access to any cheese at all. And the tailor could not have abided such deprivation.

The reason I’m beating this wearied horse to death is to explain the significance of every single American’s $85,000 share of the national debt — a per-person obligation more than twice the United States median per capita annual income. (Incidentally, that $85K figure factors in all 330 million Americans, be they infants or your lazy deadbeat cousin who has no intention of working a single day his entire life. The share of the national debt for every adult taxpayer? A cool $909,000. Yup.)

Everybody knows America’s debt won’t be repaid, yet nobody seems to care. And the kicker is that it doesn’t matter anyway.

That’s because the myriad transactions that accounted for our present obligation to repay a preposterous number of zeroes were incorrectly valued in the first place. That $28 trillion debt is the outstanding legacy of countless exchanges that already happened.

Two parties to a deal were sufficiently satisfied with their bargain to finalize negotiations and go on their merry ways. Yes, one of those parties foolishly believed she would eventually receive the unpaid balance, in addition to interest payments in the interim. But as the balance sheet shows, that expectation was wrong.

One day the tailor says to the farmer, “If you don’t pay me the blocks of cheese you owe me, I’ll not sell you any more wool socks.”

The farmer — looking sheepish but nonetheless secure in the true dynamic undergirding their negotiations — merely shrugs, and says softly: “But if you don’t give me more socks, my feet will be too cold to make you any cheese at all.” 

Thus, the essential truth: Though the tailor is owed several trillion blocks of cheese, he’d rather have one more block than no more. The terms of the transaction were wrong from the jump.

The tailor had valued his time, labor, and the cost of raw materials to arrive at a price-per-sock-pair that was twice the cost of a block of cheese, but had overlooked one simple criterion that he hadn’t priced into his socks: to wit, that he really, really likes cheese.

So let’s finally kill off this horse (which, to keep things simple, belongs to an unrelated farmer). 

America is the farmer, and the global financial system is the tailor too afraid to permit our fiscal default. Why? Because the worldwide financial system likes our cheese. It needs our cheese.

And though cheese is horrendously unhealthy in the quantities that the world consumes, we just can’t stop. That $28 trillion debt symbolizes the American empire. It’s the price tag of enforcing the integrity of a unified international market, a.k.a., “the cheese.”

Until the world’s creditors — be they China, international financial institutions, Social Security recipients, or domestic mutual fund managers pile-driving money into allegedly safe U.S. Treasury-backed securities — wean themselves from our cheese, America will continue to expand its debt load. And a debt that won’t be repaid is just a meaningless string of zeros on a spreadsheet. 

By the time the world declares that American cheese no longer has any value, the entire construct of money will be meaningless anyway — as portended by a recent article in “The Onion” entitled “U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion.”

So the next time you encounter someone shrieking about a $28 trillion national debt, voice some relaxed skepticism; explain that our debt doesn’t represent what the U.S. owes its creditors so much as it represents the intangible value of outsourcing to America the responsibility for shouldering an integrated global financial system — backed by the all-mighty American dollar. 

(True: Reality does significantly depart from our hypothetical. Because when America stops by to inform the tailor that it can’t deliver all the cheese it owes but regardless still wants more wool socks, it brings along its nuclear arsenal and historical willingness to invade sovereign nations for the sport of it. But for the sake of this column, just shut up already.)

So Uncle Sam might as well keep borrowing money with fevered abandon — shorthand for “print more money,” which I presume entails some dude at the Treasury Department adjusting an Excel document with an extra “0” — while the Nations of Earth remain “involuntarily willing” to let us get away with it. At the end of the day, the real value of our debt is ZERO.

If the world community deigns to change the prevailing status quo — and actually takes responsibility for the excesses of war, environmental devastation, and wholesale socioeconomic inequality — then it need not demand that America repay its debts. Rather, the world (and all of us) must become less reliant on American cheese.

After all, the global economy wouldn’t tolerate America’s debts if it weren’t existentially dependent on the economic activity spurred by manufacturing socks in exchange for cheese. 

Until then, Americans should probably keep one eye fixated on a future after the world wakes up — when our 401Ks are suddenly meaningless and issuing stimulus checks in a crisis is mathematically infeasible. Because last month, the Congressional Budget Office projected that America’s federal debt in 2021 would exceed the size of the entire U.S. economy (i.e., the gross domestic product — a measure of the country’s total goods and services). And someday, it’s at least plausible that two plus two will once again equal four. 

I’m not saying that the global financial system will collapse but, if it doesn’t, then I guess we’re well on our way to finding out what number comes after “trillion.”

In the meantime, let’s just all keep pretending that money has value. Because although the emperor may be mostly naked, those sure are some snazzy wool socks. 

Captain Jesse Sommer is an active duty Army paratrooper and lifelong resident of Albany County. He welcomes your thoughts at jesse@altamontenterprise.com.

It’s been a year since the Altamont Enterprise published an op-ed wherein I called for the demolition of Albany’s rotting Central Warehouse. Chronicling the past 40 years of developer misadventures, I argued then that since none of the half-dozen successive owners among whom the so-called “Eyesore” has changed hands had ever lived up to their pledges to renovate, remediate, or rehabilitate the dilapidated structure, it was time for municipal officials to consider a new approach.  

The response to my proposal was overwhelmingly positive — except in the opinion pages of the Times Union, which twice opined in response to suggest a different course. The Feb. 17, 2020 edition recommended using the giant 11-story walls as massive canvases to celebrate upstate New York imagery, thereby exuding “progress and creativity instead of stagnation and decay”, while the March 9, 2020 edition again proposed such murals, this time ignoring that even just preparing the building’s exterior to serve as a canvas — scraping and priming and such — would cost $1 million.  

But after yet another year of trafficking in these and other such unattainable fantasies, the only noteworthy activity at the Big Ugly Eyesore is the fact that — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — IT CAUGHT ON FIRE AGAIN!

Are. You. Kidding. Me? As in 2010, when the Eyesore’s interior was first engulfed in a conflagration for half a week, firefighters responded two days after Thanksgiving to extinguish yet another blaze in what Battalion Chief Geo Henderson told the Times Union was “a very high-risk building for us.”

So what’s the plan, folks? Are we going to ring in each new decade with an anniversary inferno down at the old Central Warehouse?

Is building owner Evan Blum going to financially reimburse the city of Albany for the fire department’s latest response to his failure to secure the property?

And how many times does smoke have to billow from this concrete monstrosity’s windows before it finally falls out of fashion to perennially propose that somebody pick up a paintbrush?

That idea was first advanced back in 2015. Nothing came of it then, nothing came of it last year, nothing will come of it two decades hence when the tired whimsey of murals is recycled yet again.  

But there’s more. When last I endeavored to document the building’s history by chronicling its past owners, I missed several acts in this tragic comedy of errors.   

Fortunately, I came upon intrepid reporting by Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff, a former independent journalist who — via phone — helped me fill in the gaps, to include the fact that I’d omitted Brooklyn developer Joshua Guttman from the owners roster. To save column space, just google the name “Joshua Guttman” and peruse the very first search result, to wit, a Wikipedia entry that understates his role as a “controversial property owner.”  

We need delve no further into Mr. Guttman’s background; our current concern is the latest “controversial property owner” — Mr. Blum — who has littered the past four years with worthless promises to do something, anything with the building he purchased for pennies per square foot in 2017. Like his predecessors, he’s done nothing but breathe life into fanciful pipedreams while evidently endangering the lives of firefighters.  

You know who else is disgusted by the putrefaction of “Blum’s Blight?” As it turns out: Evan Blum. 

“It looks like Albany is decaying with that thing sitting there. If I get the permission, I will immediately eradicate that feeling,” Mr. Blum told the Albany Business Review in December 2017, in what can most charitably be described as a blatant lie. 

Though Mr. Blum has proven unreachable, I tracked down one of his former employees who, while declining to go on the record, nonetheless revealed Mr. Blum’s patternistic signature.

 She pointed me to New London, Connecticut, where — according to The Day newspaper — it was in 2005 that Mr. Blum bought an abandoned building while similarly peddling lofty promises of restoration and commercial activity. Sure enough, it was 12 years later that the city filed suit against him for a decade’s worth of flagrant zoning violations and inactivity. Here’s an illustrative quote from that 2017 article:

“Richard Caruso, owner of the nearby Caruso Piano Gallery, said he has no expectations Blum will ever do what he claims. ‘When he first opened, I was tremendously optimistic. But the guy has never done any of the things he’s said he was going to do. At this point in time, I’ve abandoned all hope in him.’ Caruso said the city is as much to blame for not being more diligent in its efforts to press the issue. ‘That’s what your local government is supposed to do, especially if you’re trying to enhance the downtown.’”

How applicably familiar. What would history do without the cut-and-paste function?  

The most promising thing about Mr. Blum is the fact that, according to The New York Times, he faced criminal charges in 2000 for the partial collapse of a building he owned in Manhattan. (Promising, in that maybe such a fate will befall the Central Warehouse.)

Curious about the nature of those reported criminal charges? Put down your drink: reckless endangerment through improper/dangerous renovations, and filing false renovation plans.

This is the guy to whom we’ve entrusted our community interest in rejuvenating the Eyesore? Was even a modicum of due diligence performed by Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan’s staff before they permitted her to meet with him in 2017 and declare that “the city welcomes his plans”?

Two years later — right on schedule — Mayor Sheehan called Mr. Blum’s persistent lack of progress “incredibly frustrating.” Meanwhile, just across the river in Connecticut, local media were reporting that creditors had foreclosed on two of Mr. Blum’s properties for failure to make mortgage payments.

Taxpayers are functionally subsidizing Mr. Blum’s unconscionable neglect of this menacing public nuisance. It’s time — past time — that we dispense with delusion and knock down the old Central Warehouse.  

 How do we do it? Well, first, we need to correct the record. It’s been said that “[t]o raze the warehouse at this moment, Albany likely would have to seize it by eminent domain in a costly legal battle.” Wrong. That’s a fundamental misstatement of law.  

Pursuant to Article 11, Title 3 of New York’s Real Property Tax Law, when a property owner is delinquent in his taxes, a municipal government may foreclose on the tax lien, obtain title to the property, and then either sell that property at private auction, transfer it to the authorized land bank, or — and I’m extrapolating here — blow it to smithereens. 

Last month, I called several local officials (whose names I’m withholding as they were not previously cleared to speak on behalf of their respective agencies) to find out the total unpaid tax obligation for 143 Montgomery Street. One of them literally just laughed into the phone.  

Because out of 1,241 properties listed on the “Delinquent Tax List” (November 2020 report), the Central Warehouse is the sixth most tax-encumbered property in all of Albany County. And it isn’t even just that Mr. Blum failed to pay the back taxes when he bought the building — it’s that he’s refused to pay any taxes ever since.  

Readers accessing this column online can review the four years’ worth of unpaid school and property taxes that Mr. Blum has amassed since purchasing the building. See for yourselves by consulting Albany’s online property tax and school tax databases (Tax Map Number:  65.20-2-29).

This wouldn’t be a matter of government coercively confiscating private property; it’d be a matter of telling the dude who owns title to 515,512 square feet of crumbling concrete that he’ll not be permitted to disfigure Albany’s horizon while running up half-a-million dollars in debt to our local government.  

What makes Mr. Blum — who, to be precise, owes $472,863.41 in back taxes on the Central Warehouse — so uniquely special as to avoid such consequence? He’s clearly not going to do anything with the building. Albany must. 

“For nearly 20 years, the Central Warehouse has sat in a weird kind of real estate limbo,” a reporter wrote — ten years ago — in an article quoting a local developer as saying that “[j]ust about every real estate guy has looked at that building at one time or another, but we just couldn’t make it work. The costs were just too great.”  

Notwithstanding, and like so many before them, each of the officials with whom I spoke insistently enumerated the many logistical, financial, and environmental challenges posed by detonating the Eyesore. One of them instead depicted an attractive alternative, in which the building’s exterior could be wrapped with solar panels to power a warehouse poised to meet the ever-increasing demand of online shopping.  

Already possessing train tracks that run directly into its bowels, situated on the banks of a river, and high enough to accommodate a launch pad for an army of aerial delivery drones, the warehouse of this particular fantasy was as inviting as any of the fevered dreams that reality routinely dashes against the rocks. 

And that’s the rub, Albanites: The question is not whether anything can be done with the Central Warehouse, but whether it ever will be. And who wants to take that bet? We agonize over an eyesore that stifles area development and which thereby makes renovating it unappealing, but we fail to appreciate that, when confronted with a chicken-or-the-egg problem, sometimes your best bet is to just give up poultry.  

No one is coming to the rescue. It’s on us to protect our firefighters, cease the public subsidization, and liberate our daily commutes from this humiliating testament to Albany’s apathy. A seizure by tax foreclosure is a legal solution to the issue; it’s one the Albany Common Council should at least evaluate given its recent appetite for the ambitious (to include approving a feasibility study to reconnect Albany to the waterfront by dropping I-787 — a vastly more expensive undertaking).  

With due resolve, our elected leaders could then explore innovative ways of financing demolition and removal, such as issuing municipal bonds or applying for state and federal grants. Albany would likely realize a return on investment when it subsequently sold the newly unencumbered real estate to more practical developers.  

Or it could just leave the debris smoldering in place for all I care — unlike the inescapable Eyesore as it now stands, we wouldn’t be able to see a pile of rubble from the highway. (Though for more on how the debris could be removed and the site then remediated, check out the local media report of my exchange with a reader who expressed such concerns following publication of my column last year.)  

If it were structurally unsound, we would find the money and means to knock it down. Yet because the Eyesore is structurally sound, we’re cool with forever permitting it to be the next fire away from lethal?

 Shhh! If you listen closely, you can almost hear those insufferable law school gunners protesting my proposal whilst stumbling through 1L year: “Albany will never take possession of the Central Warehouse, because then it would be criminally and civilly liable if someone were injured at the site.”

What an unconscionably cynical perspective to attribute to Albany’s city and county officials. There are already people jungle-gyming their way throughout that structure — to include graffiti artists tagging the walls, trespassing adventurers posting their exploits on YouTube, homeless citizens lighting fires inside the building — and our municipal officials are thus already responsible for their welfare, even if legal liability might not technically attach.

Don’t get it twisted: The blood from any death or injury sustained in that building will be on Evan Blum’s hands, as well as those of the county executive, county legislators, Common Council members, and Albany mayor — who’s notably on record saying that the Central Warehouse is “not a safe place be.” 

 On December 21, 2020, Mayor Sheehan announced her intention to serve a previously unanticipated but now inevitable third term. As justification for reneging on a prior pledge to adhere to a two-term limit, she cited projects that “still need her leadership” — to include “the downtown revitalization initiative” and a program to tackle blight in the city. 

Bet.  

I genuinely don’t want the satisfaction of saying “I told you so” another 10 years from now, long after Mr. Blum has surrendered the deed and there’s yet been no progress beyond further deterioration. Albany residents deserve a serious discussion about the Central Warehouse’s fate, not one that gives our imaginations free reign to conjure images of industrial-grade frescoes that, at best, would only invite the same graffiti vandalism that now and forever adorns its walls.  

No more pretending that cosmetically decorating the Eyesore is analogous to Albany’s laudable “Capital Walls” initiative, which beautifies local edifices the interiors of which aren’t prone to cyclic combustion. Refrigerator [building] art will not eliminate the lethal hazards of the Big Ugly Eyesore, nor raise the esteem of our Capital District, nor spur a would-be downtown commercial renaissance. Just stop. Take it down, before it takes down someone else.

A July 6, 2007 Times Union report quotes former Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings as saying of the Central Warehouse: “It’s an eyesore, period …. I’m sick of looking at that building.”  

 That was 13 years ago, in an article which posed what might’ve once been a reasonable question: “Could one of Albany’s ugliest ducklings become a swan?”  

I direct readers’ attention to Exhibit “The Last 30 Years.” The answer, of course, is “no”. 

Captain Jesse Sommer is an active duty paratrooper and lifelong resident of Albany County. He welcomes your thoughts at .

Much ink will soon be spilled on the United States presidential election and its fallout. So before that cacophony drowns out the local concerns that more directly impact our lives, I’d like to recognize two leaders of a more apolitical sort — a King and a president — to thank them for their selfless service to our collective hometown.

Now join me in a deep breath, Albanites! No matter what, if you’re reading this column, you’re a critical member of the oft-contentious, oft-colorful family of Enterprise subscribers. And if we pledge to follow the examples of Mark King and Edward Hyde Clarke, we’ll be OK.

Without further ado:

Mark King is no stranger to these pages, which last year reported on his role in establishing the Helderberg Conservation Corridor. As the executive director (and one of the founders) of the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy, Mark is directly responsible for the environmental conservation of over 12,500 acres of natural, agricultural, and cultural landscapes throughout Albany, Schenectady, and Montgomery counties.

For nearly thirty years, MHLC has protected (and erected) wildlife preserves, sustainable recreational spaces, scenic vistas, and educational programs, all the while shoring up the Capital Region’s natural resources, clean water, clean air, and working landscapes for both farming and forestry. “If my dream came true,” Mark told the Enterprise in May 2019, “I’d like to see a protected path from the Catskills to the Adirondacks.”

Just how many thousands are unwittingly advantaged by his vision and initiative? Always eager to keep tabs on his projects, I emailed Mark when I returned from an overseas deployment. Stressing no urgency to respond, I asked if he’d be so kind “as to clue me in as to where efforts stand vis-à-vis the campaign to save/conserve the Picard property, the Heldeberg Workshop property, and the Bender Melon Farm.”  He replied promptly.

“Picard is in its final stages,” he wrote. “We have prevailed in court and now have the exclusive right to purchase the property as [long] as 80% is conserved ... we should have things finalized in the next couple of weeks if things go as planned. Bender is at an exciting point. Right now we need 162k to close, but only have until Oct. 29th.”

In regards to the historic Bender Melon Farm, The Enterprise reported four weeks ago that MHLC was “$90,000 short of its $1.2 million goal” to buy it; an Oct. 19 post on the MHLC website then announced that it was in need of just $57,000 more. By the time this column goes to press, we’ll have a nail-biting verdict on what Mark called a “make or break month.”

Though I rarely impose on a G-d with more pressing concerns, I make exception now to pray that our town has rallied to manifest this unparalleled community asset — comprised of the Hilton Barn, the Albany County Helderberg-Hudson Rail Trail, and the Bender Melon Farm — which intends to “link communities, history, recreation, and conservation.”

(As an aside, it was the proposed commercial development of the Bender Melon Farm a dozen years ago which first triggered my own penchant for community activism. I’m grateful to MHLC for its stewardship of this issue long after life nudged me towards other pursuits.)

No less impressive are Mark’s efforts pertaining to the 87-acre Picard Grove property, which runs along the base of the Helderberg escarpment in the midst of the Helderberg Conservation Corridor.  After intrepid Enterprise reporting and a rousing editorial raised awareness of the Grove’s recklessly hasty impending below-market-value sale to a developer, the public sprang into action; MHLC gave agency to its voice.

“The deal is not yet sealed,” Mark told the Enterprise in its Sept. 23 edition. “It’s a little bit of a cliffhanger beneath the cliff.” Yet Mark’s team is working steadily towards an outcome that will preserve acreage as integral to our hometown’s identity as the name “New Scotland” itself.

And what of that blissfully serene 250-acre Heldeberg (still inexplicably containing no “R”) Workshop wetland forest where I spent so many of my childhood summers? Something about Board Chairman Alvin Breisch’s announcement that Heldeberg Workshop had “entered into a  partnership with MHLC to permanently protect [its] lands from development” permitted a sigh of relief. As in: “Phew! King is on the case.”

Granted, my praise for Mark is shorthand for the eternally grateful compliments due the other MHLC members who work tirelessly on these endeavors, not to mention the legion of Good Samaritans who open their wallets to fund fulfillment of shared dreams. To borrow a sentiment from news anchor Tom Brokaw’s farewell on Dec. 1, 2004, Mark is “simply the most conspicuous part” of an all-encompassing communal ambition. I wish I could personally thank every spoke in that wheel right now, but Enterprise editor Melissa Hale-Spencer gets rather testy when I approach 2,000 words.

Which is why my commendations to E. Hyde Clarke must be interpreted through the lens of broader praise. For as president of the Upper Washington Avenue Neighborhood Association (UWANA) in the City of Albany’s Twelfth Ward, his role is primarily organizational — representing the will of his community by channeling its energy, aptitudes, and demands in a manner that augments its legal power.

Don’t be fooled by Clarke’s unassuming demeanor; beneath a signature smile and soft-spoken timbre is a tenacious community advocate with a strategic grasp of the legal process. I met Hyde in 2012, at the dawn of his career as a local land-use attorney. As with every recent law-school graduate, I asked him how on earth he could’ve been so masochistically stupid as to become a lawyer.

“I wanted to serve my community,” he said, shrugging.

…. Um, what?

The last eight years offer concrete proof that what might’ve been a cliché is in fact his ethos. Hyde sees the law not as a profession, but as a tool — or, better, one of many arrows in the quiver of community muscle. Nowhere is this more evident than in his role in effectuating UWANA’s firm commitment to its character.

Late last year, Stewart’s Shops Inc., proposed to demolish the abandoned former KeyBank on the corner of Washington and Colvin Avenues, along with two existing multi-family homes, so as to construct a two-story convenience store with gas pumps.

Neighbors opposed to suddenly residing next to a gas station — which would sit directly across the street from a rival gas station and just one block down the road from another — were aghast. Others rather liked the prospect of being within walking distance of award-winning ice cream and milk. As UWANA president, Hyde had the unenviable task of identifying, and then reconciling, many competing interests.

When this process ultimately revealed that most neighbors demanded changes in Stewarts’s application — less demolition, implementation of traffic safety precautions, fewer gas pumps, more accessibility from the sidewalk — Hyde leveraged his legal background to engage at the planning-board level, working to secure his neighbors’ desires while concurrently accommodating the commercial objectives of an interested applicant.

As has repeatedly been the case — from Altamont to Voorheesville to, eventually, the remotest regions of the solar system — Stewarts proved unwilling to make any of the requested changes. This compelled Hyde to articulate the fraught decision that a conditional use permit be denied; on Aug. 25, 2020, the planning board voted down Stewarts’s application.

Hyde was able to influence this process only because so many passionate and knowledgeable advocates lent their voices to pushing back on Stewarts’s application; their activism empowered Hyde to argue for solutions agreeable to all parties.

As Hyde told me, change often forces communities into a position of opposition; their gut reaction is to oppose any variation to an existing way of life. But Hyde saw his role as that of a broker — looking at all sides to extract mutual interests, thereby deriving a balance between permitting development and safeguarding a neighborhood ecosystem.

Yet in the face of Stewarts’s unrelenting and serial intransigence, Hyde realized that the community’s opposition would be vulnerable if expressed as merely that: community opposition. He therefore cleverly pivoted to a different tactic, one that would give his neighbors’ voices the authority of law.

In 2017, the city of Albany passed the Unified Sustainable Development Ordinance (USDO), which zoned the said residential apartments on Washington Avenue as “Mixed Use Neighborhood Commercial” (MU-NC). Arguing that these properties (which had always been residences) were zoned incorrectly — and therefore seemingly permitted a use not in accordance with the character of the neighborhood — Hyde drafted a lengthy “zone change” petition to have the properties rezoned residentially (to wit: R-2).

As Hyde stated: “This is not a Stewart’s issue. It’s a land-use issue. The obstacle to [Stewarts’s] commercial imperative shouldn’t be seen as knee-jerk NIMBY [Not-In-My-Backyard] opposition, but rather as a result of a properly-devised law which would never have permitted such a massive operation in the middle of a close-knit community comprised of young families and seniors.”

In short, Hyde went about endowing the community’s voice with legal legitimacy.

“I don’t want developers to feel that they have to pass some litmus test every time construction is proposed,” Hyde explained in an email. “I want them to adhere to a law that defines how to be a good neighbor, and which then grants them commercial predictability and an easier path to approval. If a non-residential structure is proposed, it should comply with a standard that protects existing property owners. That’ll also ensure [the business] is well-received and supported by its intended patrons.”

I noted that his approach recalled 20th-Century Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis’s concept of a “lawyer for the situation,” and asked if that was how he perceived his role.

“Sort of,” he wrote back. “We all want to see abandoned buildings reused or redeveloped. But that can’t be the objective in and of itself. Commercial progress has to ‘fit,’ has to enhance a community, not degrade it. I’m ready to help any entrepreneur meet that threshold, if they’re ready to join our neighborhood in good faith.”

I told neither Mr. King nor Mr. Clarke that I’d be highlighting them in my monthly column; they’re both likely mortified that I’ve done so. They don’t seek the limelight, and generally slip into the media’s pages, posts, spots, segments, and broadcasts incident only to their organizational missions.

But that’s precisely the point. They selflessly dedicate themselves to advancing communal causes, representing community concerns, and bettering the lives of both their neighbors and future generations that will unknowingly enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Thank you, guys. You’re two of the many reasons that turning off cable news is so refreshing.  Because in that silence, we have space to note that behind all the competing lawn signs are scores of people who advance our common destinies, bind our families together, and ensure that someone is in charge of serving the robust and delicious Thanksgiving feast over which our beloved yet crazy uncles can spout off.

I sign-off by once more adapting Tom Brokaw’s words to honor these hometown heroes whose examples we’d do well to bear in mind on the eve of a tragically polarizing presidential election. Like Mark and Hyde, may we work together to advance that “vital legacy of common effort to find common ground ... on which to solve our most vexing problems.”

For “they did not give up on the idea that we’re all in this together.”

Captain Jesse Sommer is an Army officer and lifelong resident of Albany County.  His father, Dean Sommer, is a senior partner at Young/Sommer LLC, the law firm where Edward Hyde Clarke works.  Jesse welcomes your thoughts at .

Editor’s Note:  The Enterprise reported earlier this week that Picard’s Grove is now successfully under a conservation easement. 

Are you asking if I support the death penalty, or if I believe in the sovereign state’s right to kill?  Those questions operate in altogether different universes, and I counsel caution in conflating philosophy with procedure.

But you’re right to ask, now that the federal government has resumed executions of federal death row inmates (three last month) previously suspended since 2003. So far this year, the United States and its component states have put 10 people to death; another five will be executed by the end of 2020.

I support state-sanctioned slaying — it’s the foundational premise of my job. Be it the clandestine raid on bin Laden’s compound or the righteous annihilation of those who opposed America’s unyielding advance up Normandy’s banks in 1944, I accept our government’s inherent right to employ deadly force as among the most justifiably self-evident of all societal truths.

But every right is wedded to its own abuse, and eventually breeds excess. That’s why any defense of state lethality is fundamentally tested when applied to the mode of American capital punishment. And since my dad has cornered the market on debating America’s post-Vietnam foreign policy, I’ll focus this discussion on the domestic context, and explain why I don’t support the death penalty — yet.

What proceeds is the perspective of a veterinarian’s son, who was raised vegetarian because “it’s wrong to take innocent life” but who simultaneously learned that there was no injustice in “putting to sleep” a German shepherd after she ripped apart the family goat a second time. (Of the German shepherd, ’twas said: “This world is inconsistent with her nature.”)

And the thesis of this column is that those who seek to abolish the death penalty are as misguided as those who support its current form.

First, on “justification”:  Our essential imperative must be a shared philosophical agreement that, if done justly, the state should have (and reserve unto itself) the right to kill. If you don’t agree with that, then here we must part ways — for my acceptance of state legitimacy requires that it function as an adequate arbiter of justice, and satisfactory dispute resolution necessitates the full array of options.

Because, if the menu of equitable recourses is lacking, vigilantes will just handle it themselves.  Illustrated: It’s not hard to imagine aggrieved parents resorting to their own ingenuity and enterprise to rectify a perceived deficit in justice if a court’s post-conviction treatment of their child’s murderer is too soft.

(Let’s pause to offer the sanctimonious a chance to pronounce that “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Now let’s together note the wholesale failing of that cliché’s basic arithmetic, since “an eye for an eye” leads not to blindness, but rather just to poor depth perception.)

Second, on “rationales”: Capital punishment is generally rationalized pursuant to theories of public security and deterrence, punishment and retribution, or — to a tragically lesser extent — “utilitarian mercy.”

My dad likes to say that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent unless applied to jaywalking. What he means is that the threat of execution won’t dissuade someone from committing a violent crime out of passion, despair, callous disregard, fury, or evil. But, if crossing the street could fetch a death sentence, you’d likely be a tad more conscientious about where you stepped off the curb.

Meanwhile, I’ve always been troubled by vengeance as a rationale, as I presume there’s something intrinsically wrong with people who perpetrate wanton violence. Whether it’s rage or hate or desperation or run-of-the-mill-sociopathy, only the maladjusted, abused, or insane generally act on the capacity to commit violent crime — and something about wreaking fatal revenge on such innately broken people seems unsavory.

That discomfort with revenge informs my adherence to the final theory: utilitarian mercy.  Remind me to tell you about the time I contracted COVID-19 in a war zone. For six dreadful days, the coronavirus ravaged my fever-wracked body, yet it was the resulting mandatory quarantine in a tiny windowless room that truly sucked.

By day nine, I was firm in my belief that life in a barren cage with no hope of escape is a greater violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment than a swift and painless execution. So, while I sympathize with those who oppose the death penalty because “rotting in prison is worse,” there’s likely a better use of limited state resources than accommodating retributive sadism. To my mind, utilitarian mercy is the only moral and practical rationale for the death penalty.

But if that’s the death penalty’s ethical framework, is there an ethical defense of the alternative, i.e., forever imprisoning a German shepherd who’s exposed her nature as inconsistent with this world, when “elimination” would serve a just punishment while also freeing up cage space? I’ll give you two.

The first acknowledges that the racial inequality of America’s death penalty is so unacceptably heinous that it fails outright the “this is why we can’t have nice things” test.  Roughly 42 percent of the faces on America’s death row are Black — more than three times their proportion of the U.S. population.

The disproportionate tendency of prosecutors to seek — and of juries to impose — the death penalty against black defendants for comparable criminality smacks of ethnic cleansing. (Yeah, I said it.)

What right have we to remove imperfect people from an imperfect world? If you want an impartial capital-punishment regime, roll up your sleeves and fix every other social ill first, starting with socioeconomic and environmental disparities as well as biases in law enforcement. 

The second ethical defense of a life sentence over a death sentence is that forever caging a dangerous German shepherd equips that veterinarian to rectify her mistake if forensic testing later reveals Lily Goat to have been viciously attacked by a different dog.

Earlier, I noted as self-evident that the state should have the right to kill if doing so could be done justly. But putting into practice that abstract philosophical precept is a complex proposition. 

This is where things break down. Because since 1973, 170 prisoners have been fully exonerated of the wrongful convictions that landed them on death row. For perspective, that’s one person spared the ultimate miscarriage of justice for every 10 people who have been executed (1,522 in total) since America’s death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Are you kidding me?

“Existential Proposition 1” must surely be that state execution of the innocent is humankind’s most egregious social sin. “Existential Proposition 2” follows that a single such instance is worse in moral magnitude than a thousand acquittals of the guilty.

Armed with these companion propositions, I thus bequeath unto tomorrow’s legislators five guiding principles with which to erect a just regime for capital punishment:  

— FIRST, none shall be executed for nonviolent crimes.

There’s a lot of socially destabilizing behavior out there, but a con man who preys on old women’s bank accounts is best imprisoned, not destroyed. This principle ensures that the (capital) punishment fits the crime, i.e., that one should be denied life only where it intentionally operated to deny another’s.

(Is a co-conspirator who helps devise the fatal plan but doesn’t actually pull the trigger nonetheless guilty of a violent crime? In the interest of time and limited column space: sure.)
 

— SECOND, none shall be executed for crimes absent a genuine and knowing admission of guilt — one freely made and restated in court, free from coercion or duress, upon advice by legal counsel.

Whether it’s the notoriety-seeking serial killer who wants attribution for his misdeeds or the genuinely remorseful boyfriend who allowed his murderous jealousy to consume him, this principle is a safeguard guarantee that a perpetrator rationally acknowledges why he’s to be subjected to that most extreme application of state power.

Lacking this awareness or acceptance, the alternative of a (life)long prison sentence will afford plenty of time to come to terms with what’s been done. 
 

— THIRD, none shall be executed for crimes absent corroboration by deoxyribonucleic acid AND the existence of sight-based indicia of unassailable reliability.

This “poison pill” insists on an evidentiary threshold which is, by design, nearly unattainable. If the justice system is to put a dude to death, his culpability must be assured to a mathematical 100 percent.

Fortunately, few violent crimes leave no DNA behind, and much of the recent high-profile violence has been accompanied by that requisite “sight-based indicia or reliability” (e.g., unbiased eyewitness accounts, high-resolution surveillance footage, the first-person camera-phone video with which the perpetrator live-streams his rampage).

If prosecutors can meet this most implausible of evidentiary burdens, perhaps capital punishment is the only proper recourse.
 

— FOURTH, none shall be executed for a crime where there exists a credible rationale for its perpetration.

The wife who kills her husband to spare herself another 15 years of horrific physical abuse, the father who kills his pre-adolescent daughter’s rapist, the sister who kills her brother’s murderer — I mean, there’s murder and then there’s murder, am I right? 

“A Time to Kill” wouldn’t have made the bestseller lists as “A Time to Await Judicial Determination on Defendant’s Third Appeal of the Motion to Stay Proceedings in the Matter of Defendant’s Plea for Rehearing of the Sentencing Case.” 
 

— FIFTH, none shall be put to death except for by well-oiled and industrial-scale guillotine. 

That’s right.  If our society can’t come to grips with the appallingly gruesome messiness of capital execution, then we have no business being in the business. The gas chamber, the electric chair, lethal injection — these are modernity’s innovations to sanitize the experience of punitive state killing, leaving serenely intact the body from which the state has just separated a soul.

And each of these methods has at one time or another gone horrifically awry, presenting a traumatizing spectacle of nightmarishly unconstitutional torment as the dead-man-walked convulses in pain because the toxins missed the vein, or the voltage was wrong, or the nervous system only partially responded to the gas. 

The 21st Century guillotine permits no such mistakes. Advances in machining can independently assemble a self-piloting tractor-trailer without even a millimeter’s deviation in how tightly a rivet is screwed on; if the same technical efficiency is applied to a technologically-perfected guillotine with a blade crafted of the finest Tungsten-Titanium alloy, then the only drawback to this executionary method is society’s “pleasant company” hang-ups.

Quick. Painless. Guaranteed. Theatrical. Certainly, your jaywalking epidemic would be solved.

For the death penalty’s die-hard (pun) supporters, this five-prong approach affords a just and certain resolution to the most egregious violations. And its restrictions don’t limit the broader application of justice; where the death penalty is unavailable because these criteria aren’t met, there still exists a whole slew of draconian measures by which to punish offenders (e.g., life imprisonment). 

For capital punishment’s bleeding-heart (pun) opponents, my approach resolves the core concerns of systemic failure and irreversible mistake; capital punishment would be applied sparingly, rarely, and only when guilt was corroborated, acknowledged, and indefensible.

True: faulty science, biased testimony, false accusations, and — that most monstrous of sins — prosecutorial misconduct will always present the peril of a wrongful conviction, but a death sentence for a crime “beyond all doubt” won’t be an option for convictions attained merely “beyond all reasonable doubt”.

Yes: There are scores of moving accounts of redemption, where the embittered and testosterone-fueled former victim of child abuse kills in his 20s, only to embark post-conviction on a journey of self-discovery through the prison library, emerging as a remorseful pacifist who even obtained his law degree.

So? A silenced victim deserves better than to serve as her killer’s ticket to enlightenment; her life was worth more than that anecdotal reference in the feel-good Dateline special on her murderer’s rehabilitation.

I don’t care what wisdom Nidal Hasan learns behind bars, or what penitence Timothy McVeigh might’ve shown had that meal not been his last. Neither Dylan Roof’s nor Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s guilt is in doubt.

I’m unpersuaded that the Golden State Killer is too old for death (like, what?). When it comes to avowed monsters like these, I’m less Samuel Jackson’s “yes they deserve to die and I hope they burn in hell,” and more “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

Except that: My philosophical commitment to capital punishment withers before ever-present societal injustice and the inescapable Truth that every one of us is complicit if the state takes an innocent life. Ergo, I ferociously oppose the death penalty until we as a species are mature enough to handle it. 

But someday, those Five Principles could sustain a system where the death penalty isn’t a recourse at all unless it’s the first recourse. And in that far away future, where an accused (1) acknowledges his guilt of (2) a violent crime that’s (3) beyond any doubt by virtue of irrefutably corroborative evidence and (4) for which there’s no reasonable justification, I’ll support the (5) expedient option that delivers both justice and the mercy of instantaneous escape from a world inconsistent with his nature. 

For a capital punishment that spares the wrongfully accused while delivering the quick and painless passing of the rightfully accused, let’s turn for inspiration to that other lady of justice — the Queen of Hearts — as she triumphantly bellows “off with his” etc. etc. and all that.

Does that answer your question? 
****

Captain Jesse Sommer is a lifelong resident of Albany County, currently deployed to Afghanistan with the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne).  He welcomes your thoughts at .