Two Cheers for Obama!

Tribune

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: August 7, 2015 Last modified: August 8, 2015

Attacked almost as fervently by the left as by the right, Barack Obama is now doing what second-term presidents often do – looking to his legacy. He has been remarkably successful, not least in the face of a rabidly hostile right wing in Congress and with a frequently lukewarm Democratic Party in support. Many Democrat legislators would make New Labour’s worst sound like Bolsheviks in comparison.

For Americans, Obamacare is his signature legacy. Although deeply flawed in comparison with a single payer system, compared with what passed for healthcare before, it is a huge step forward. Like most American legislation, it is a complex product of messy compromises with the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies which had to be persuaded not to kill the reforms completely It is sad but true that while donors have considerable influence in the Tory Party, and were gaining it rapidly in New Labour, in the United States, quite often they literally write the law. That is one of the reasons why donor-driven policy making has failed to reform the American financial system since the sector is a major donor to the Democrats.

Even so, Obamacare has offered millions of Americans health insurance coverage who could not afford it before and has even managed to constrain the cost inflation that has already made American healthcare the most expensive in world. Diehard Republicans have tried more than 50 times to repeal it. The Republican leadership is glad at the failure. Depriving millions of voters of healthcare in the run up to an election would have brought reality crashing down on the empty rhetoric of the Republican right.

Foreign policy is a traditional recourse of second-term presidents trying to make the history books and here Obama has faced down strong lobbies such as the Israel and Cuba to make a mark. It is only a couple of decades since Bill Clinton bowed down to the Cuban American Foundation and ratcheted up sanctions against Havana in return for campaign donation. Obama has now finally normalised relations with Cuba and is surviving unscathed. Third-generation Cuban Americans now either don’t care or even actually welcome more access to their ancestral homeland. The business community is more concerned with getting its toe in the door than closing the gate on Cuba business. It has long been clear even to the more rational American conservatives that Cuba is no threat to the US nor to the hemisphere and that the policy has been counterproductive. The domestic lobby was moribund, and internationally there was nothing but praise for the move.

Over Iran, he has had to work much harder to overcome the prejudices and passions against Teheran where there are unlikely allies from the Saudis to the Israelis uniting to sabotage the deal. Obama has had to take on the mother of lobbies, AIPAC and its allies, exhorted on by Benjamin Netanyahu and a host of derangedly conservative Likudnik billionaires. Again, he saw his chance. Polling showed that Netanyahu’s support among the American Jews was minimal. Fewer and fewer American Jews see their identity as particularly tied to Israel and, like the general American public after Iraq and Afghanistan, even fewer relished the idea of another all-out war in the Middle East – let alone the one that the Israeli leadership is so ostentatiously trying to provoke. John Kerry and Obama have kept the line to get the agreement which is now enshrined in United Nations Security Council resolution 2231. Netanyahu’s attempts to interfere directly in Washington’s foreign policy decisions have been so outrageous that he might well have alienated the Democrats away from the hitherto unbreakable bipartisan support for the Israel lobby.

But Obama’s administration is so overcome with its own temerity that it shows signs of the “fight or flight” syndrome. The release of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is clearly an attempt to compensate Netanyahu, as is the public talk of increasing military and economic aid. So, can he force a durable Middle East peace settlement on Netanyahu and Israel? It was one of his first avowed ambitions on taking office, and after all the humiliations he has endured at the hands of Israel’s Prime Minster, it would be of deep personal and historical significance to pull it off now with political pressure instead of the traditional pandering.

About Ian Williams

Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent

Reductio ex absurdo!

The potential impact of the Hobby Lobby case

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September 3, 2014 | By Ian Williams

Religious tolerance can only go so far

The Supreme Court seems to have been replaced by some religious conventicle. In the course of ignoring reality to fit theology, it has previously created some awesome precedents, but the Hobby Lobby case is a doozy.

For any American ostriches with their heads in the sand or non-US readers who thought it was just a strip from Ripley’s Believe it Or Not!, this is the recent ruling that says a corporation owned by religious believers has the right to opt out of providing otherwise mandatory contraceptive services to its employees under their healthcare plans if it offends the owners’ sensibilities.

It has always been surprising how many Americans imbue the Supreme Court with some objective detached legal wisdom, as it has always interpreted laws in a highly partisan way. In its glory days, at the time of the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court invoked ‘state’s rights’ to protect the rights of citizens from slave states to retrieve their property, even in states that did not recognize that people could be property.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court follows the famous Citizens United case in endowing corporations with powers, souls and consciences. I can hardly count the ways this ruling offends common sense. The justices seem to have a very circumscribed view of religion, somewhat contiguous with the Vatican (before the current pope, at least). First, the same court ruled some years ago that using peyote in American Indian religious ceremonies was still illegal, and somehow I can’t see the learned justices even considering the documented use of big spliffs in Rastafarian liturgy.

So would a sincere religious belief in the virtues of slavery – as espoused by almost all churches in the South before 1860, and a few even since – allow companies to enslave the sons of Ham? (This is, of course, hypothetical – it is much cheaper to employ them on Federal minimum wage.)

I foresee an almost endless line of petitioners for religious exemptions: Christian Scientists who own companies will want exemptions from providing surgery in employee healthcare plans; Jehovah’s Witnesses will want to exclude blood transfusion services. Shakers and similar sects eschew procreation – will they be allowed to avoid providing pregnancy services and maternity leave for their fecund employees? The courts have previously frowned on Quakers and other pacifist sects objecting to paying taxes to support military spending – will those same sects now be allowed to refuse legal leave to military reservists if it offends their sensibilities?

There are also interesting business implications. To begin with, once the Green family incorporated its Hobby Lobby business, it became a separate person, surely? But if the personhood of the owners is coterminous with that of the company, what happens to limited liability? If the company goes bust, doesn’t it follow that if the owners and the company are one and the same thing that those owners should accept the moral hazard of the financial – or indeed criminal – charges against the company?

When a company breaks the law, it cannot be imprisoned, executed or otherwise returned to the path of righteousness. Its owners and managers can practice corporate mayhem and escape unscathed. If the Green family and Hobby Lobby are coterminous in conscience, should they not be coterminous in consequences? If the company does wrong, shouldn’t the full force of the law come down on the owners – who cannot draw any distinction between themselves and the company when it suits?

There is more than a moral hazard here. As Forbes enterprisingly discovered, most of its pension plan is invested in companies making precisely the same type of products it refuses to allow its health plans to buy. Should the Green family be sued for its failure to maximize returns by discouraging employees from using products that would enhance the company’s pension funds? Why not?