n the run-up to the nuclear deal's second anniversary, Cornelius Adebahr warns of the need for a rational approach to Iran.
For over three decades, American policy towards Iran could build on broad consensus. Democrats as much as Republicans were eager to be 'tough on Iran', imposing sanctions on the country, threatening allies over their less hostile relationship with Tehran, and generally not shying away from talk about how desirable (induced) regime change was. In a way, it was a perfect example of the 'politics stops at the water's edge' maxim coined during the onset of the Cold War exactly 70 years ago.
This bipartisan accord has now become the victim of a clearly circumscribed, yet considerable policy success: the nuclear deal of July 2015. Regardless of what its critics say about its – actual and alleged – flaws, it has been successful in that it has verifiably taken the immediate threat of an Iranian bomb off the table. For the past two years, Washington and everyone else around the world have been freed from this concern so that they could focus on other regional and geopolitical challenges, from fighting the self-declared Islamic State to addressing the Saudi-Iranian rivalry to, yes, confronting Iran over its ballistic missile program. All they had to do to be relatively safe from an Iranian 'breakout' was to rigorously implement the agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
And fully implemented the deal has been, as both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, and the U.S. government, under Presidents Obama and Trump, have confirmed numerous times. Still, it seems that Iran has come out of the deal stronger than the United States, for reasons which have nothing to do with the agreement itself: Tehran's ally, President Bashar al-Assad, is winning the war in Syria; its arch enemy, U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, is losing the war in Yemen; and even in Afghanistan Tehran boldly teams up with the Taliban to drive out the U.S.-led alliance.
This state of affairs so unnerves a number of U.S. policymakers that they want to punish Iran at any cost, starting by undoing the one thing that works: the nuclear deal. Chief among these naysayers is President Trump, who promised to tear up the deal when he was on the campaign trail and continues to whine about it in office. He can count on the support from like-minded opponents of the deal, both in Congress and among some think tanks and lobbyists from the otherwise much-despised Washington "Blob".
Yet despite a would-be deal-breaker in the White House and a Republican-controlled Congress, Washington has so far held back from nixing the JCPOA.
This is about to change, as the argumentative buildup from UN ambassador Nikki Haley's speech at a Washington, DC think tank to Donald Trump's bluster at the UN General Assembly in September indicates. In fact, the administration's policy on Iran is about to become so disentangled from reality that it turns the bipartisan principle of foreign policy on its head: It makes foreign policy itself "stop at the water's edge", with decision in DC being taken on the basis of presumed domestic benefit and wishful thinking.
To understand the sad irony of this twist, consider the following scenario. On October 15, President Trump refuses to certify to the U.S. Congress that Iran is in compliance with the JCPOA. He does so regardless of any evidence in support of Iranian non-compliance, but merely because "he [does] not want to". The Iranian government immediately accuses Washington of breaking the deal and tests another of its missiles in response. Both the White House and Congress respond by talking of the need to increase the pressure on Iran over what they claim to be a reckless violation of the deal.
With two dangerous steps up the escalation ladder, the conflict is likely to further intensify – still, the fact is that neither side has yet breached the JCPOA. The certification is a purely domestic requirement that the U.S. Congress imposed on the President with the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015. The only consequence of Trump 'decertifying' Iran is that the U.S. Congress can then reinstate, in a 60-day period and under expedited procedure, the statutory sanctions that were suspended pursuant to the JCPOA. If Congress decides to do nothing, or fails to garner a majority to bring about sanctions legislation, then the JCPOA remains untouched – technically speaking.
Yet this does not count much in an environment of mistrust and with an overall foreign policy detached from facts on the ground, instead fuelled mainly by bellicose rhetoric. (No doubt, Tehran's hawks are as good at this as are Washington's.) Unless cooler heads in the U.S. and among American allies find a way to preserve a minimum level of rationality in the administration's approach to Iran, there's little hope that the Iran deal will still be in place on the second anniversary of its entry into force, in January 2018. Instead, the region may be embroiled in another violent upheaval of the United States' own making.
National GOP leaders on Wednesday released a 9-page document that they called a tax "framework" (available here on the Washington Post site) describing in vague terms how they intend to cut taxes for the nation's wealthiest people while doing very little that serves the government needs. Overall, the GOP framework would amount to about $2.2 TRILLION in less revenue to support federal programs (like protecting the environment from corporate pollutants, supporting higher education loans for students, funding basic university research) (assuming $5.8 trillion loss to lowering rates and shift to territorial system and maybe $3.6 trillion recouped by eliminating as yet unspecified deductions). See GOP proposes deep tax cuts, provides few details on how to pay for them, Washington Post (Sept. 27, 2017).
But of course--although most academic research suggests that a mortgage interest deduction serves no legitimate purpose, the GOP 'six' indicate they will retain it, because it "help[s] accomplish important goals that strengthen civil society as opposed to dependence on government: home ownership". Fact is, countries without a mortgage interest deduction have just as high rates of home ownership, and the economic effect of the deduction (especially in its current form) is to favor purchase of ever larger homes by those taxpayers in the upper income distributions.
As with so much else from the man currently holding the office of President, what is said (paraphrasing) --that the wealthy will not get a tax cut and the poor and middle class will get big tax cuts --can't be trusted. Like so much else, Trump says he is "very good at it", but then he thinks he is good at everything and is inevitably shown to be fairly ignorant of the issues that matter. The framework, like everything else the GOP has proposed this year --including repeal of the Affordable Care Act; defunding of Medicaid; withdrawal of scientific information about climate change from the EPA website, reduction in the size of existing national monuments meant to protect the land for all of us --is designed to benefit the GOP establishment's wealthiest donors who continue to call the shots on tax and economic policies.
And of course the claim that this 'framework' can result in "the simplicity of a 'postcard' tax filing for the vast majority of Americans" is absurd. The complexities of accounting for various income sources and the heightened complexities that most low-income Americans face in claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit will remain, even if rates are reduced and the standard deduction replaces the standard deduction and personal exemptions. The claim (page 4 of the framework) that "typical families in the existing 10% bracket are expected to be better off under the framework due to the larger standard deduction, larger child tax credit and [unspecified] additional tax relief that will be included during the committee process" seems clearly wrong for many if not most of those taxpayers in that lower bracket.
And their posturing that this "reform" is to benefit "small businesses" is equally absurd. The main beneficiaries of the pass-through rate will be the huge joint ventures, master limited partnerships, real estate partnerships (like the Trump companies), and hedge funds whose owners will enjoy a reduction in their tax rate on that income from 39.6% to 25%. Most actual small business owners are already paying tax around the 25% rate.
The proposal will not end incentives to ship job and capital overseas (see page 3 of the framework on goals)--those gimmicks with transfer pricing of intangibles will continue, as any lowering of the corporate tax rate here to 20%, which is below the international average of 22.5% (according to the report--it may well be too low a figure), will push other countries to lower their rates as well. It is a corporate lobbyist's ideal playground--playing one country against the other to push the "race to the bottom" faster and faster and continue the quasi-sovereign hegemony of multinational companies around the world. If we want to end the corporate inversions and the transfer pricing gimmicks, we know various ways we could do that, including changing transfer pricing mechanisms in ways that various academics have recommended. Congress hasn't really wanted to, since their wealthy corporatist donors wouldn't like it.
What reveals the hypocrisy of the GOP is their sudden switch from deficit hawks during the Obama administration, which made it harder to get a decent stimulus package through Congress and to promote funding for desperately needed infrastructure projects, even when interest rates were incredibly low, to a willingness to incur significant deficits in order to debt- fund even more tax cuts for the wealthy on top of the Bush-era tax cuts that led to a switch from federal surplus to federal deficits and more debt. As Ed Kleinbard so aptly states, "The Republican tax "plan" is a deficit-busting mess, and it would slash the President's taxes", Vox.com (Sept. 28, 2017).
What reveals the GOP hypocrisy even more is their presentation of this framework without any appropriate CBO or Joint Committee on Taxation analysis. And statements by Senator Bob Corker (Tenn) in connection with scoring tax reform that they don't trust the CBO, implying that the GOP should go to a private (pro-GOP) source for "dynamic scoring" so that it will show the results they want--is truly worrisome. See The sudden and regrettable demise of the CBO, USNews.com (Sept. 21, 2017). It disparages the nonpartisan professionals in the Budget Office while showing that the GOP is willing to do practically anything to further the lie that their budget, with huge tax cuts proposals for the wealthy, will miraculously result in widespread economic growth that will float even poor folks' boats.
We already know that tax cuts do not have the miraculous growth effect that they claim. Kansas actually engaged in an "experiment" to prove that tax cuts would stimulate growth. Even the state's GOP legislature recognized the utter failure of the claim, as the state's economy sank under the burden of the tax cuts. Kansas actually voted to end the experiment and raise taxes!
And of course we have experimented this way nationally with various Republican administrations. Reagan cut taxes drastically in his first year in office, caused huge deficits and then increased taxes every year of his term afterwards. The cuts ended up most especially benefiting the wealthy, because the tax increases took the form of higher payroll taxes and other means of hitting lower-income folks that didn't bother the wealthy. George H.W. Bush promised not to raise taxes, but recognized that he could not keep that promise and run the government appropriately. If we are going to spend billions on continuing to buy arms and military planes we don't need (a silly idea, but one that seems ingrained in the GOP mentality), then we have to have more money to fund things we really do need, such as a fair medical care system for the most vulnerable (Medicare) and funding for basic research that corporations don't want to pay for (NSF and NIH, among others). George W. Bush cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, fulfilling corporate lobbyists wish lists that had been circulating for 20 years, including creating a 'tax holiday' for corporations to repatriate untaxed profits that they had offshored at a very low rate. All that was promised to drive economic growth, but of course it didn't. As with the similar idea in this year's "reform" talk, the 2004 tax holiday provided a way for corporations that had engaged in various gimmicks to move their profits overseas to low tax jurisdictions (even while the money is often in U.S. banks) to bring it back to the US at low or no taxes and then use it to do stock buybacks that benefited their wealthy shareholders with big boosts of income taxed at preferential capital gains rates. Most of those corporations did not use those funds in any way to create job--in fact, some of the biggest so-called repatriators laid off employees at the same time. The tax holiday merely gave even more of a tax subsidy to unpatriotic corporations that were willing to scam the system by pretending to sell their invaluable IP to offshore subsidiaries, and then even higher payments to the CEOs for raking in more cash. In other words, the tax holiday was a great exercise in supporting the creation of an even greater inequality gap. Historical trends are fairly clear on this. The U.S. economy has thrived more under Democratic presidents who have increased taxes and has turned to deficits more under Republican presidents who have cut taxes.
What we should do at a minimum is increase the amount that corporations pay into the federal government, so that a higher percentage of our GDP is paid in corporate taxes, as in other developed countries. And we should add a financial transactions tax, at least, to the mix while eliminating the preferential capital gains rate and the like-kind exchange provision.
Funding the government so that it can deal with the hundreds of billions in financial aid needed in Texas (Hurricane Harvey) and Florida (Hurricane Irma) and Puerto Rico (Hurricanes Irma and Maria) while at the same time starting to handle some of the deteriorating federal roads, railways, bridges and other infrastructure throughout the country would be the best way to ensure that we could continue the economic growth begun under the Obama administration. That funding would require REAL tax reform: eliminating the preferential capital gains rate, eliminating the many loopholes by which highly profitable corporations manage to pay almost no federal income tax, and creating a significantly higher graduated rate structure for taxing estates (while eliminating the step up in basis).
(Of course, we should also recognize that spending the hundreds of billions annually on defense does much less to defend America and make it great than spending a higher proportion of that money on education, infrastructure, and other ways to increase opportunities for all. Let's get rid of the militaristic jingoism that keeps the U.S. armament industry rolling in cash and start funding scientific and health research through NSF and NIH. That is the way we created a thriving middle class after the second World War and the way to support continuing innovations that will make a difference in our lives and economy into the future.)
First, here's a rough typology of the lies upon which the sales job for the Republicans' wasteful, regressive tax cut is based.
Lies, lies, lies. And while it's early days, and much could change, My impression is that a lot of people outside of DC Republicans aren't buying them. The media and the Twitterverse is especially lit up with lies #1 and #2. In fact, here's the NYT doing some calculations on lie 1b ("Trump could save more than $1 billion under his new tax plan"; that's mostly due to eliminating the estate tax).
Also, on #1, see Chuck Marr's take on the benefits to the wealthy:
This analysis also applies to the reduction in the tax rate (from about 40 to 25 percent) for business pass-through income, which the R's are trying to sell as helping small businesses. In fact, 86 percent of pass-throughs are already taxed at 25 percent or less. Marr: "79 percent of the benefit of this tax cut would flow to filers with incomes above $1 million. The 400 households with the highest incomes would receive an average tax cut of $5.5 million from this provision alone."
Re #3, since most of the cuts go to the top, there's not much left to trickle down to the middle class, but the tax cutters are making a big deal out of how their plan to double the standard deduction (or, to increase the zero tax bracket) will help lower income families. And, no question, some will benefit from that.
But what they don't talk about is their plan to get rid of personal exemptions, which also lower the tax burden for families, especially those whose deductions currently lead them to itemize (and thus forego the current standard deduction) and numerous members. To determine whether middle-class families get a cut or an increase under the new plan, you must see if the higher standard deduction (plus the proposed expansion in the child tax credit, about which details have yet to be released) is greater than the loss of personal exemptions.
Thankfully, Josh Barro carefully, with caveats for what's known and what's not, does the number crunching. His conclusion: "While there are still a lot of details to be filled in, the information we have available suggests the new Republican tax proposal would raise income taxes on many families who make just a bit more than the national average."
Finally, once you've gone through all this muck and taken the requisite shower to clean all that BS out of your pores, here's yours truly on what actual tax reform might look like. Simply put, the goal is to raise the ample revenue we need to meet the challenges we face, while pushing back on market-driven inequalities.
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will hear Janus v. AFSCME, a case that could profoundly affect the ability of public-sector workers to improve their wages and working conditions. The case threatens the right of the majority of workers, through their democratically elected union, to bargain a contract with their public employer that requires every employee covered by the contract to pay their fair share of the costs of negotiating it, administering it, and enforcing it. The Court decided this issue forty years ago in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education and it has been the law of the land since.
Janus is nothing more than the latest attack on workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively. The Court considered this issue last term in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which resulted in a 4-4 split decision upholding a lower court decision that permits public employee unions to assess fees on non-members who benefit from collective bargaining and union representation and who unions are required to represent. In any other circumstance, it would be outrageous to demand the benefits of a common enterprise without paying one's fair share. Union representation is no different. Eliminating fair share fees protects people who want to get something for nothing and as a result, starves unions.
It is profoundly undemocratic to elevate the objections of a minority over the democratically determined choices of the majority of workers. This principle is what is at stake in Janus. The decision in this case will determine the future of effective unions, democratic decision making in the workplace, and the preservation of good, middle-class jobs in public employment.
Mark Weisbrot
US News and World Report, September 28, 2017
HuffPost, September 28, 2017
As the war of words between the governments of Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un has spiraled into child-like name calling and escalating military threats, the world shudders at the possible consequences. The Pentagon has reportedly estimated that a North Korean attack with conventional weapons against the South would kill 20,000 people a day; but deaths could reach the millions in the event of a nuclear war.
Meanwhile, in Yemen, the US is already participating militarily in what humanitarian aid groups have labeled crimes against humanity. US military forces are participating in refueling Saudi bombers and also in their targeting, which has killed thousands of civilians. By cutting off food imports, the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen's civil war has put more than seven million people at the brink of starvation.
The "Saudis are deliberately trying to create a famine inside Yemen in order to essentially starve the Yemenis to the negotiating table" — and "the United States is participating," said Senator Chris Murphy.
And now, as a result of the destruction, Yemen has the worst cholera outbreak in the world, which has infected more than 500,000 people, with at least 2,000 deaths so far. The UN estimates that a child in Yemen dies every 10 minutes from preventable causes.
When our government threatens whole nations with annihilation, or participates in massive cruelty and collective punishment in far-away places, it is important to at least try to understand why this happens. While these crimes are illegal (even Trump's threats against North Korea are prohibited by the UN charter) and nothing could justify them, our political leaders and policy analysts nonetheless fill the mass media with rationales that often win at least tacit support from many people who should know better.
The idea that North Korea's nuclear capacity is a threat to the US, in particular because Kim might be crazy enough to attack us, was dismissed in a recent New York Times report:
The fear is not that Mr. Kim would launch a pre-emptive attack on the West Coast; that would be suicidal, and if the 33-year-old leader has demonstrated anything in his five years in office, he is all about survival. But if Mr. Kim has the potential ability to strike back, it would shape every decision Mr. Trump and his successors will make about defending America's allies in the region.
In other words, if North Korea could retaliate against a US attack, Washington would have less power in Asia. It seems that when we dig beneath the surface of "national security" arguments for terribly dangerous or violent foreign policies, it is more often power, rather than the security or well-being of Americans, that underlies them. Otherwise, the negotiation of peaceful solutions would be the first priority.
But as recently as June, the Trump administration dismissed an offer from North Korea and China to negotiate a deal in which North Korea would freeze its missile and nuclear testing in return for the US freezing its "big, large-scale military exercises" in the Korean peninsula.
The same imperial priorities that prevent a negotiated solution with North Korea appear to be a major reason for US participation in the war and atrocities in Yemen. In this case it is part of Washington's strategic alliance with the Saudi dictatorship, which has recently been subjected to increasing criticism for its support for terrorist groups, including ISIS.
Fortunately, members of Congress are pushing back against the unconstitutional, unauthorized participation in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
For nearly three years, the Executive Branch has deployed the US military, at the Saudi dictatorship's request, against an indigenous Yemeni rebel group called the Houthis. The Houthis are unrelated and opposed to Al Qaeda and ISIS — the groups targeted by the US under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. A bipartisan group of lawmakers is forcing our country's first public debate and vote on these unauthorized hostilities by introducing a "privileged" resolution, which means it goes to the floor of Congress over the objections of leadership, to direct President Trump to withdraw US forces from this famine-threatening Saudi war.
But there needs to be more pressure from below. The tens of millions of Americans who already understand the difference between "national security" and empire need to be more active in getting Congress to restrain the Trump administration.
Bernie Sanders recently noted that "Saudi Arabia is not our ally," and proposed a more "even-handed" approach toward the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. He also opposed the foreign policy goal of "benign global hegemony" that he attributed to "some in Washington," and denounced the "organizing framework" of the "Global War on Terror" as a disaster.
This is a good sign, and indicates that the movement that propelled Sanders to win 46 percent of the Democratic presidential vote has the potential of putting forward a more independent foreign policy. The mass support for athletes who are "taking a knee" during the national anthem at sports events is another welcome development that wouldn't have seemed possible just a few years ago. The athletes' protest is against racism and police brutality, but at the same time they — and their tens of millions of supporters — have refused to be intimidated by the false and "paid patriotism" promoted by Trump. This, too, has implications for the feasibility of badly needed debates, and independent thinking on US foreign policy.
Trump has contributed to this mass awakening by personally embodying and spewing out so many of the hateful wrongs that need to be righted. No need to thank him for that — he has made the world a more dangerous place ― but we must seize the moment.
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and the president of Just Foreign Policy. He is also the author of "Failed: What the 'Experts' Got Wrong About the Global Economy" (2015, Oxford University Press). You can subscribe to his columns here.
