The Great Debate

We are witnessing the slow death of public opinion in this country.  It’s being displaced by party opinion.

These days, more and more Americans are inclined to judge issues from a partisan viewpoint.  In March, according to a Pew Research Center survey, twice as many Republicans (53 percent) as Democrats (27 percent) said the economy was poor.  Yet, from everything we know, Republicans are not suffering more economic deprivation than Democrats.

Elections today are less and less about persuasion and more and more about mobilization: You rally your supporters in order to beat back your opponents.  Republicans did that in 2004, when President George W. Bush got re-elected with 51 percent of the vote. Democrats did that in 2012, when President Barack Obama got re-elected with 51 percent of the vote.

Republicans today are all fired up over the controversies involving the Internal Revenue Service, the State Department and the Justice Department.  They see Watergate.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), for example, said the abuses confirm “our worst fears about our government,” namely, “that your government’s targeting you, your government’s spying on you and that your government’s lying to you.”

The long-discussed free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union was formally endorsed by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address to Congress. Obama asserted that “trade that is fair and free across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.” A prominent presidential endorsement will not prevent a long and disputatious negotiation, but a trade pact could yield potentially huge economic rewards — and also provoke serious political opposition on both sides.

A U.S.-EU trade and investment agreement has been talked about for two decades but never actively pursued. On both sides of the Atlantic, there has been fear that any such deal between the world’s two largest economies would disadvantage poorer nations. A U.S.-EU accord was deemed less desirable because greater economic benefits could be gained from a global trade agreement involving more countries. Trade experts worried that it would undermine the legitimacy of the World Trade Organization. Moreover, based on past bitter disputes over frozen chickens, bananas, genetically modified organisms and other food and agricultural products, a U.S.-European Union agreement was deemed too politically fraught and difficult.

Now, with Europe in recession, the United States unemployment rate stubbornly high and both regions groaning under public indebtedness, Brussels and Washington are looking for ways to stimulate jobs and growth without spending money. Liberalization of trade and investment is seen as one way to do that.

An aura of excitement and predictability surrounds the president’s annual State of the Union speech: A few days of hyped drama and TV punditry build to a political Woodstock featuring generals, justices, senators, Cabinet secretaries and House members, all under one roof. Up in the balcony, the First Lady plays host to a few iconic citizens who recently shared a heroic moment of fame with America.

Environmentalists are on higher-than-normal alert this year, after President Barack Obama made a sweeping inaugural promise to tackle climate change, an issue he had largely avoided during his first term.

If the president reprises that theme in Tuesday’s speech, he’ll join a long list of predecessors warning that we’re leaving a mess for future generations. And if past is prologue, the green talk and pageantry may be the only things delivered on the president’s lofty words.

As Washington and its great power partners prepare for more nuclear negotiations with Iran, the Obama administration and policy elites across the political spectrum talk as if America is basically in control of the situation. Sanctions, we are told, are inflicting ever-rising hardship on Iran’s economy. Either Tehran will surrender to U.S. demands that it stop enriching uranium or, at some point, the American military will destroy Iranian nuclear installations.

This is a dangerous delusion, grounded in persistent American illusions about Middle Eastern reality. Because of failed wars-cum-occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan; a war on terror that has turned Muslim societies ever more firmly against U.S. policy; and de facto support for open-ended Israeli occupation of Arab populations, America’s position in the region is in free fall. Increasingly mobilized publics will not tolerate continuation of such policies. If, in this climate, the United States launches another war to disarm yet another Middle Eastern country of weapons of mass destruction it does not have, the blowback against American interests will be disastrous. Nonetheless, that is where our current strategy – negotiating on terms that could not possibly interest Iran while escalating covert operations, cyber-attacks, and economic warfare against it – leads.

For its own interests, Washington must take a fundamentally different approach. President Obama needs to realign U.S. relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran as thoroughly as President Nixon realigned relations with the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s. Simply “talking” to Iran will not accomplish this.

Syria, chemical weapons and the United States. If nothing else, President Barack Obama last month was emphatic. “I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad,” Obama declared at the National Defense University in early December, “….The world is watching. The use of chemical weapons is…totally unacceptable….[T]here will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”

But what a difference a New Year makes. At a January 10 news conference, the administration’s senior security officials, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Martin E. Dempsey, recoiled: Consequences won’t involve the Pentagon. Better wait to secure the arsenal after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad falls, Panetta said. Dempsey stated: “Preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable.” The result, as Panetta explained: “We’re not working on options that involve boots on the ground.”

Assad must have smiled. Washington had gone wobbly on chemical weapons. With the deterrent value of the president’s remarks in question – and one unconfirmed report that Syria used a chemical agent in Homs on December 23 – the chemical specter remains. This raises the key question: Would Obama really stand by if the Syrian government gassed thousands of its citizens?

A victory in Tuesday’s Israeli elections by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Yisrael Beiteinu alliance and the ascent of even more extreme parties are indications of Israelis’ continued move to the right.

It is also an indication of the limits and the challenges faced by the Obama administration in its relationship with Israel. Despite Netanyahu’s obvious preference for President Barack Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in the U.S. presidential elections — and a sense that he was intervening through proxies — Obama’s ability to influence the outcome of the Israeli elections has been negligible.

The Obama administration’s situation underscores the need for a quick decision about its policy toward whatever type of governing coalition emerges in Israel after the election. If Netanyahu forges a government with parties to his right, the White House should drop the pretense of possible peace negotiations and formulate policy accordingly: It can either produce a detailed peace plan or fall back on highlighting international law and human rights and the obligations of the parties that they entail.

The United States has officially recognized the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people. It has also designated al Qaeda in Iraq-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, which often leads the fighting effort in Syria, as a terrorist organization, thus making it illegal for anyone to buy it even a cup of tea. This double-barreled political action, after months of hesitation, is intended to convey the message that Washington supports the relative moderates of the Syrian opposition wholeheartedly but wants to exclude from its ranks Sunni extremists.

The trouble is both moves come late in the game. At this point, U.S. influence may not be sufficient to accomplish the objectives.

A lot depends on the Syrians themselves. Most Syrians do not want to see sectarian slaughter following the current civil war. The question is whether they will be willing and able to restrain the Sunni extremists in their midst. It will take courage and commitment for today’s revolutionaries to speak up and protect Alawites, Christians, Druze and Shia who are suspected of supporting the Assad regime. Mass atrocity in the aftermath of political upheaval is more the rule than the exception. There is little sign that the international community will be able to mount a serious protection effort.

As President Barack Obama’s first term ends and second begins, it is an opportune time to reflect on the cost and sheer volume of new red tape his administration has created; analyze its impact on small businesses, and prepare for what’s next.

The Obama administration has pursued an active regulatory agenda. The overall regulatory burden is now $1.8 trillion annually, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and this year alone new rules have added $215.4 billion in compliance costs. Small businesses are understandably concerned that the second Obama term will only add to this already heavy regulatory burden.

There has already been a wave of “economically significant” regulations ‑ those with an annual impact of $100 million or more ‑ that outpaced both the Clinton and Bush administrations. That pace slowed leading into the 2012 elections, but a second wave has been building.

Gasoline prices are at all-time highs. As a result, energy policy concerns echo in boardrooms and family rooms across the U.S. At a recent House Energy Committee hearing on “The American Energy Initiative,” Harold Hamm, the top energy adviser of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, warned that President Obama’s proposed repeal of the energy tax provisions for oil and natural gas producers (including a manufacturing tax deduction that all U.S. manufacturers receive) would decrease drilling activity by 40 percent. Can the U.S. afford that?

President Obama wants to end the right of major U.S.-based oil companies to deduct tax payments they make to foreign governments for their overseas operations. He also wants to end tax credits that are allowed to every oil and gas company. Romney wants to protect American competitiveness by keeping the tax benefits intact for oil companies. Let’s look deeper at the energy industry and the taxes energy companies pay.

According to the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and natural gas industry pays more than $30 billion on average to the federal government in taxes, rents and royalties every year. The industry is taxed at an effective rate of 60 percent – higher than any other domestic industry.

In 2008, 17 percent of office-based physicians and just 9 percent of hospitals had basic electronic health records (EHRs) and fewer than 10 percent used electronic prescriptions. This doesn’t mean most physicians were Luddites; rather, there were powerful disincentives to their adoption of health IT.

For example: Installing electronic health records required retraining physicians and staff, exacting months of significantly reduced productivity. Technology from different vendors typically did not communicate with each other, so the free flow of information — referral letters, hospital discharge summaries, lab results, X-rays and all the rest — that would make the investment worthwhile was not there. Then there was the network effect: Until a lot of doctors and hospitals were using electronic health records and a lot of vital information was available electronically — even if the various proprietary systems did communicate — it wasn’t worth it. And finally physicians feared that an expensive new EHR system would soon be obsolete, requiring another big capital investment.

On Feb. 17, 2009, President Obama signed the Recovery Act, which contained a number of healthcare provisions, including the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which nullified these disincentives. HITECH did this by providing physicians payments of up to $44,000 from Medicare and $65,000 from Medicaid — and hospitals getting millions of dollars, with amounts varying based on how many Medicare and Medicaid patients they cared for — to help defray the cost of EHR adoption. Obviously, this is not free money. Physicians and hospitals receive the incentive payments if their EHRs are certified as capable of supporting “meaningful use.” This, in practical terms, means they can be used for e-prescribing, securely exchanging patients’ health information and electronically submitting data on the quality of care. The law also includes a penalty for physicians and hospitals that do not implement EHRs: Their Medicare payments will be reduced beginning in 2015. It also empowers the government to set technology standards regarding interoperability and the secure exchange of health information.