Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 654

Nanny Employers Are Here

Kaiser Health News has an interesting report out on the rise of ‘voluntary’ wellness programs across the country—programs which fine or reward employees based on whether they participate in regimens designed to make them healthier (and thus cheaper to insure). Employers have started to institute these penalties and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has responded by floating a rule to govern these programs:

Under the proposal, wellness programs would be considered voluntary so long as the employer rewards or penalizes an employee no more than 30 percent of the cost of health insurance for a single worker. Since the average cost for such coverage is $6,025 a year, the 30 percent limit would be about $1,800.

Employers cannot fire workers for declining to participate nor can they deny them coverage, the proposal says.  They also must give workers a notice explaining what medical information will be obtained by the wellness administrator — often a private contractor — and how that might be used.

Some people, however, are already raising warning flags:

The equation tilts too far against workers “when … employers can charge you a couple thousand dollars more for refusing to give private medical information, [that] doesn’t sound very voluntary to me,” said Samuel Bagenstos, a University of Michigan Law School professor.

It makes sense for insurers to manage their risk pools by incentivizing healthier behaviors directly. Charging people who present health risks and don’t take steps to lower those risks—by quitting smoking or losing weight or what have you—is part and parcel of what insurance is all about: matching premiums to risk factors.

But doing it through the employer-employee relationship adds a further, more insidious level of coercion into the process. Employers already have a good deal of control and leverage over the lives of their employees; giving them more power to dictate behavior (as Bagenstos points out, a penalty complicates any claim to this being ‘voluntary’) is not sound policy. No matter how caveated it all is in the statutes—workers can’t be fired, denied coverage—this is precisely the kind of arrangement that could lead to all sorts of unintended consequences.And indeed, we should be trying to move the whole system in the opposite direction. Employer-provided health care benefits are one of those zombie artifacts of an era where lifetime employment with a single company was very much the norm—an era which is quickly receding into the past. It’s time to make a serious effort to delink health care and other benefits from employment. The sooner, the better.

Protests in Yerevan Have the Kremlin Spooked

Street protests in Armenia have continued for a fifth straight day in response to an electricity price hike of 16.7 percent announced on June 17 by the government in this poor landlocked nation of 3 million. The protests show no sign of easing off. The Guardian:

The protests in Yerevan, which began on Friday, escalated significantly after police fired water cannons to disperse seated demonstrators on Tuesday morning. By Wednesday evening thousands of people had gathered on Marshal Baghramyan Avenue near the presidential palace, chanting slogans and blocking traffic.

In the early hours of Wednesday, ruling party politicians and others formed a human shield between police and protesters, although negotiations over a potential meeting with the president, Serzh Sargsyan, fell through for the second night.

Why is this significant? The parent company of Electric Networks of Armenia, the firm that has a monopolistic grip on electricity distribution on the country and that his been insisting on the price hike, is Inter RAO, a large Russian energy company whose chairman is none other Igor Sechin, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest pals.

As the indispensable Leonid Bershidsky has pointed out, even if the protests hadn’t been warmly greeted by Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov (who happens to be an ethnic Armenian), Moscow was more than ready to see the West’s fingerprints all over them:

“I’m sure there are plenty of militants from Ukraine and there is an outside coordination center run by the same political operators who ran the Maidan in Kiev,” Russian political scientist Sergei Markov wrote on Facebook. “There can be no doubt that this is no spontaneous outpouring of popular protest in Yerevan. It’s all a matter of technology and the organizers’ main goal is to incite bloodshed.”

According to Markov, the Yerevan disturbances are the response of a sinister Western cabal to Armenia’s 2013 decision to opt out of a trade and association agreement with the European Union and instead join Putin’s Eurasian Union.

In addition, the Guardian notes that Igor Morozov, a member of the foreign affairs committee in the Duma, accused the American embassy of actively participating in fomenting the unrest in Yerevan.

Bershidsky thinks that the Armenian protests don’t yet stand much of a chance of turning into a Ukraine-style revolution (read his whole piece here for more context) and he may well be right. But then again, the world has not been short of surprises this year, and with it never being clear just how much Kremlin bluster is propaganda and how much is serious, it’s safest not to write anything completely off.In any case, we here at TAI will certainly be following events on Twitter using the #ElectricYerevan tag.

What Sanctions Have Done to Iranian Oil

Western sanctions have hamstrung Iranian oil exports, reducing the country’s most important revenue source by nearly 50 percent in just three years. The EIA reports:

Sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union (EU) at the end of 2011 and during the summer of 2012, respectively, led to the displacement of more than 1.0 million barrels per day (b/d) of Iranian crude oil on the global market. Iran’s main buyers in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere have replaced Iranian crude oil with barrels from other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). If oil-related sanctions are lifted, Iran will look to regain export market share, competing with other OPEC members with similar crude oil grades.

In 2011 Iran was exporting 2.6 million barrels of oil per day, a far cry from current levels, which hover around 1.4 million bpd. This is the carrot the West is waving in front of Iran in the ongoing nuclear negotiations: the promise of crude flowing freely once again.

But the global market is hardly in need of another strengthened supplier. Thanks in part to American shale, a global glut has depressed prices some 40 percent below their level last summer—more oil out of Tehran could further depress prices. For OPEC, which has so far chosen not to cut production and instead endure the bear market to compete for market share, Iran’s potential export resurgence won’t be especially welcome. Most of the cartel’s petrostates are running in the red as they try to edge out non-OPEC producers; now these regimes are facing down the prospect of increased competition within their own ranks.[Updated]

Scrooged: Can NATO Be Fixed?

The current NATO ministerial in Brussels is taking place at a time when rhetoric and reality on the future of the alliance remain disconnected. U.S. and NATO leaders have been issuing condemnations of Russia’s actions in Ukraine and warnings not to try to intimidate the alliance members along the northeastern flank; the conclusions they have drawn about the sanctity of NATO’s border should be reassuring. For instance, speaking in Berlin on June 22, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter noted that “as Russia aggressively modernizes its military capabilities, it also actively seeks to undermine NATO.” Carter underscored that, while America does not seek a cold or hot war with Russia, “we will defend our allies, the rules-based international order . . . and stand up to Russia’s actions and their attempts to reestablish a Soviet-era sphere of influence.” This general thrust remained, albeit with a different tone, when three weeks prior NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg opined, “Russia poses no immediate threat to NATO countries, and the military alliance still hopes bilateral relations will improve.”

Speaking on a visit to Norway, Stoltenberg asserted, “What we see is more unpredictability, more insecurity, more unrest. . . . [But] I believe we don’t see any immediate threat against any NATO country from the east.” Last but not least, the German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen seemed less circumspect than usual when she said, after the recent NATO exercises in Poland, that “it is essential to make it clear to our neighbors that we stand up for their protection.” The tenor of professed solidarity across Europe has been similar, though with evidently more urgency and determination emanating from states along the northeast flank, such as Poland and the Baltics who have argued repeatedly not for reassurances but for a permanent NATO presence on their territory as the most reliable deterrent against any attempts by Putin to jump NATO’s red line.The “reassurance” rhetoric has been buttressed somewhat by a slew of small-scale exercises, like the latest NATO exercise in Poland of the so-called Spearhead Force rapid reaction unit of some five thousand troops drawn from several member-states. Other NATO exercises will continue through June, involving 15,000 troops from 19 member-states, with more follow-up exercises in the fall that should again engage roughly 10,000 troops. Last but not least, the U.S. is discussing prepositioning heavy equipment, including armor, along NATO’s northeastern flank to support up to 5,000 troops should they needed to be deployed in an emergency. So far so good, at least in symbolic terms and on paper.But all such NATO actions need to be taken in context. The first and obvious discrepancy between what NATO has been doing and what Russia has been doing is the scope of the effort on the ground. Most of the U.S. contingents deployed on exercises in Poland or the Baltic States are mostly company size, with limited numbers of mechanized equipment, aircraft, and ships. Those exercises are clearly overmatched by Russian exercises, which show Moscow’s ability to mobilize 30,000–100,000 personnel, with mobilization times as short as 48–72 hours. (To put it in perspective, 48 hours is the beginning of the NATO decision-making cycle, assuming that the crisis does not occur on a weekend, when we may be looking at 72 hours.)But the larger question is one of NATO’s overarching strategic vision and its changing internal dynamic. Since the war in Ukraine, NATO has become “particularized” to an unprecedented degree, whereby the security optics of individual European member-states now drive the debate to a greater extent than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The northeast and southeast flank countries are both commendably more proactive in their commitment of resources to defense, but also increasingly, if understandably, narrowly focused in their perspective on the future of the alliance. In Poland, the Baltic States, and Romania, recent history of Russian (Soviet) domination remains the immediate reference point for thinking about collective defense. The more recent members who remain the most exposed to a Russian attack—hybrid, conventional, or even nuclear—are also the most eager to buttress their NATO security guarantees with direct defense cooperation with the United States, seeking a strategic security relationship with Washington of the kind only a few select states in different parts of the world enjoy today. The surge in Russia’s involvement in the war in Ukraine has transformed the relationship into one in which an increasingly elaborate pattern of cooperation exists between the U.S. and the frontier allies.The situation is different for the largest players in Europe—France, to an extent the United Kingdom, but especially Germany—for whom thinking about NATO is defined by a more generalized vision of an alliance whose very existence, rather than its mission, defines its core value. Hence the territorial defense issues now touted by frontier NATO states are the respected, but nonetheless somewhat mundane, commitments against which to measure the totality of Europe’s relations with Russia, its important business interests, and the larger question about the future of Europe’s normative order. In this culturally postmodern but economically mercantile Europe, there seems to be no contradiction between the tough rhetoric on Russia’s war on Ukraine, the general disavowal of a military solution there, and the contemplated negotiations of another leg of the Nordstream pipeline or other future business deals. NATO’s “view from 20,000 feet” has also resulted in growing fissures between the “old” and “new” members, and on the part of the former a growing sense of buyer’s remorse over letting the latter into the club in the first place—for the price to pay in their relations with Russia seems higher than what they had bargained for.This sense of a growing disconnect between the “old” and “new” allies has recently been shown to be more than just unease among policy elites in Western Europe. A recent Pew study provided concrete data on public disengagement in Western Europe when it comes to allied solidarity, the very foundation of collective defense. In the Pew study roughly half or fewer in six of the eight countries surveyed agreed that their country should use military force if Russia attacked a NATO ally. At least half in three of the eight NATO countries stated that their government should not use military force in such circumstances. Perhaps the most telling of the new fissures opening up in NATO since the Ukraine war is the fact that the strongest opposition to responding with armed force comes from Germany (58 percent), followed by France (53 percent) and Italy (51 percent). In short, there is now clearly a political obstacle in Western Europe to doing what is necessary not just to properly resource defense, but also to demonstrate enough cohesion to deter threats and defend against aggression.This leaves the United States both as the key provider of allied security and the country most in need of clarity as to what assets Europe can bring to the increasingly complex and dangerous international environment—from Asia through the Middle East to Eastern Europe. And here things get complicated. Besides the U.S., only four NATO members (Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Estonia) out of the 28 members are projected to meet the 2 percent GDP defense spending threshold committed to during last year’s summit in Wales. Worse still, as Stoltenberg just warned, NATO’s total defense spending this year will decline 1.5 percent, and although 19 of the 28 members are increasing their outlays on defense in real terms, collective NATO defense spending will go down for yet another year, from $968 billion in 2013 to $942 billion in 2014 to $892 billion this year, respectively. Germany, the country that the Obama administration has relied on to manage and resolve the Ukrainian crisis, has questioned the rationale of the 2 percent defense commitment, sticking to 1.3 percent of GDP as its defense outlay, arguing that the size of the country’s GDP makes up for the reduced number.The question of Europe’s overall unwillingness to step up to the plate on defense expenditures has been raised repeatedly with little overall success by U.S. politicians, analysts (this one included), and the media. But regardless of how mundane this argument may seem in Europe today, the simple reality is that doing more with less has always been a lark, and that the U.S. effort to develop a new strategic approach for the alliance requires money. The current situation in which the United States provides 70 percent of NATO defense spending is not so much unsustainable (after all, strategic stasis is nothing new when it comes to the past quarter century of European alliance politics), but rather simply a fundamental limitation on what NATO’s European allies will be able to do with the United States, and hence how relevant European security concerns are going to be in Washington in the coming years. While Europe celebrates the accelerated exercise tempo and the establishment of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), the United States urgently needs NATO to develop a new playbook, not just for Europe but for other areas of the world where security conditions will likely continue to deteriorate. NATO needs to be able to respond collectively to cyber and terrorist threats, and to work together as a new field of transnational threats emerges. But most of all, if Europe wants to have a credible security guarantee from the United States, in return it must accept its fair share of security responsibility. That means making the principle of mutuality the centerpiece of the strategy going forward. As much as Europe wants to continue to rely on the United States for defense, Washington has to have at least a clear sense that in crises outside of Europe the allies are willing and able to contribute real capabilities. That means Europe needs to make a significantly higher investment in defense, without which it will never field the new capabilities it needs to work with the United States going forward. If Europe continues to ignore this investment imperative, it may not destroy the alliance outright, but it will continue to cheapen and ultimately undermine NATO’s credibility and, ultimately, its ability to deter and defend in a crisis.The North Atlantic Treaty Organization remains without a doubt the most successful alliance in history. And yet since the Russian invasion of Crimea and the ongoing war in Ukraine it has become an organization riven with strategic self-doubt. This doubt exists not because NATO’s members no longer believe in shared values, but because Europe has in effect taken a page from Dickens’s Christmas Carol, Scrooging the alliance out of existence. The alliance, which has evolved from the collective defense of the Cold War era, through out-of-area operations in the Balkans, to ISAF in Afghanistan and a joint operation in Libya, today confronts a stark choice: find the resources to fulfill the increasingly urgent collective defense needs of Europe and the United States on the Continent and balance those tasks with continued global requirements, be they working with the U.S. to provide regional security in areas outside Europe, or in cyberterrorism, or other transnational threat areas; or else become a relic of a bygone era whose glittering but hollowed-out shell will serve to underscore its growing strategic irrelevance. I know it’s been said before, but it really is up to the Europeans to decide how this plays out.

Religion in a Plain Brown Envelope

As I surf through the Internet in search of blog-worthy religion news, I stumble over all sorts of curious sources. Caffeinated Thoughts is an online magazine that describes itself as offering “a Christian and conservative view.” The editors explain that “caffeinated thoughts” means the kind of thoughts one might have while leisurely sipping a cup of coffee. That would not appeal to “Christian conservatives” who regard coffee-drinking as sinful (there are not a few of those). It certainly appeals to me, as it evokes the atmosphere of that great and barely surviving institution—the Central European coffee house. (I doubt if today’s “Christian conservatives” in America understand that the patrons of the traditional coffee house would look on a coffee house in which one cannot smoke as resembling a swimming pool in which one cannot swim).

Be this as it may, on June 9 Caffeinated Thoughts published a story about a question on the civics exam required of permanent residents wanting to become U.S. citizens. (I did not have to go through this ritual, because I had a recently acquired college degree from an American institution. It was assumed—mistakenly, I suspect—that anyone thus credentialed would know all the answers.) One question asked the candidate to check off two rights of anyone living in the U.S. from a list of six. Instead of “freedom of religion”, the list named “freedom of worship.” This terminological changed was noticed and irritated Senator James Lankford (Republican, of Oklahoma), who protested to the Secretary of Homeland Security. He pointed out, correctly, that the two phrases are by no means synonymous: “Freedom of worship” refers to an activity commonly undertaken in a specific location – a home, a church, a mosque. “Freedom of religion” is a much more expansive concept, including a person’s right to freely exercise his religion anywhere at all, including the public square. This might seem to be a trivial distinction, were it not for the fact that the narrower understanding of this freedom animates various non-trivial actions of the Obama Administration and other positions taken by American progressives.In a broader context what this means is the privatization (or, if you will, the domestication) of religion. There is an underlying, unspoken (perhaps unconscious) assumption: Religion is okay if engaged in by consenting adults in private, not so if it spills over into public space. The similarity with pornography is telling: It comes through the mail in plain brown envelopes; you are free to view the contents in the privacy of your home; just don’t view them in a public place. Senator Lankford and many other Americans don’t accept this limitation. In fighting for the right to exercise their faith in public, they can deploy the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which defends this right. Ironically, this law was pushed through Congress by liberal icons like Senator Ted Kennedy. The move was triggered by the claim to First Amendment rights by Native Americans using peyote to induce religious trances, and prohibiting the profane uses of mountains deemed sacred in traditional religion. Little did Kennedy et al. expect that their law would be cited to defend the right of Baptist fundamentalists to denounce evolution and to curb access to abortion.Since the passage of the Affordable Health Act (aka Obamacare) in 2010, there has been a wave of litigation over various aspects of the law (not surprising since it is estimated to have extended control by the federal government of some 17 percent of the American economy). Many of the challenges have come from the provision requiring employers to include contraceptives in the coverage provided by their health plans. There was indeed a so-called “religious exemption” if this provision was refused on grounds of conscience. But a complicated bureaucratic process had to be undertaken in order to get an exemption, and there was also a limited list of eligible institutions (the Archdiocese of Boston—yes, St. Elizabeth Hospital—no). It says something about the religious tone-deafness of the Obama Administration that its officials were surprised by the ensuing storm of protests (not only by Roman Catholics). The Administration retreated step by step, offering various compromises, which satisfied some but not all opponents of Obamacare. Things quieted down a bit. But another storm erupted after the Supreme Court issued its decision in 2014 on the Hobby Lobby case.The Hobby Lobby case has been a big step toward an expansive definition of religious freedom. Hobby Lobby is a commercial company. Although commercial law treats a corporation as if it were a human person (that of course is the whole point of limited liability), it would be absurd to say that Hobby Lobby as an entity has First Amendment rights. But the company is “closely held” by one family. The human persons in that family do have the right to the free exercise of their religion (presumably Evangelical). They should not be forced to violate their religiously formed conscience by following the dictates of Obamacare – not only while engaged in prayer or worship, but in any activity they understand to be religiously significant.A rather different issue has been cluttering the courts lately—cases of people refusing, on religious grounds, to perform specific services, and as a result threatened with lawsuits, high legal costs and even possible loss of livelihood. Usually this is due to actions by what could be called the LGBT moral police. There was the case of a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple (with two little figures holding hands on top of the cake?), a photographer refusing to take pictures of a same-sex wedding, and the owner of a pizzeria simply opining (no actual incident ever occurred) that she would not want to cater a same-sex wedding. This last truly surreal incident, in a small town in Indiana, created a campaign of boycotts and divestments against the entire state (I wrote about this a few weeks ago). Or, most ominous of all, a threat of persecution for “hate crimes” against a number of Evangelical pastors who preached against homosexuality. Given currently rampant progressive views about improper intrusions of religion into public life, I wonder how Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement would stand up against an updated charge of illicit religious intrusions into public spaces.The United States has a particularly strong tradition of religious freedom, and the Supreme Court (whatever else one may think about some of its recent decisions) has mostly been resolute in its defense of the First Amendment. The kind of secularism that seeks to privatize religion (like other dangerous or distasteful behavior) is quite new in America (I have previously called it Kemalism—the ideology of Kemal Ataturk, who established the Turkish republic in 1923 on the basis of an aggressive secularism, principally in opposition to Islam). There are other examples. Let me look at two other cases, in ascending order of intensity—France and China. The French Revolution started out with an aggressive secularism established by the Jacobins, reaching a symbolic climax when a prostitute was crowned as the goddess of reason in the Church of the Madeleine in Paris. The struggle between the republic and the Catholic Church persisted throughout the 19th century, effectively ending with the republican victory in the Dreyfus affair, and the separation of church and state in 1905. But the French definition of the republic as laïque had a secularist flavor quite different from the American case. French laïcisme has recently been revived in the confrontation with radical Islamism. The law barring “ostentatious” religious symbols exhibited in public had an obvious (though officially denied) anti-Muslim animus. Its original aim was to prohibit the public wearing of Muslim headgear such as the veil or the burqa (as a government minister put it quite poetically, “the republic wears an open face”). In fidelity to equality before the law the prohibition had to be put in universal terms, not just targeting Muslims: Thus it is illegal now to “ostentatiously” wear large Christian crosses or Jewish skull caps. At this time it is too early to tell whether French democracy will go in the direction of legally supported religious pluralism on the American model (some voices in France have urged this), or whether it will revert to the earlier secularism.Of course the most coercive efforts to privatize religion (if you will, tolerating it if at all in a plain brown envelope) were made in Communist Russia and China. (For a masterly comparison of the two cases see Christopher Marsh, Religion and State in Russia and China, 2011.) The two outcomes have been very different, until now pretty much opposite. During the Cultural Revolution under Mao all religions were bloodily suppressed. Since then, it seems to me that the religion policy of the regime has veered away from Marxist atheism to what I perceive as a sort of Confucian damage control—religion is basically an illusion, but potentially dangerous. (In Chinese historical memory there looms large the 19th-century Taiping Rebellion, led by a charismatic leader claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. This episode claimed some twenty million lives.) Therefore religion must be tightly controlled in entities under the aegis of the state. (In the case of Protestantism, which has been growing explosively for the last four decades, the Three Self Patriotic Movement [great name!] is tightly controlled by the State Administration of Religious Affairs in Beijing.) Christians have been rather well treated—until recently. For a while now there has been a campaign led by the provincial party secretary to knock down crosses (“ostentatious” religious symbols indeed) from the roofs of churches in Wenzhou, the Chinese city with the highest percentage of Christians, known as “China’s Jerusalem.” So far about 400 churches have been thus defaced. (In its June 2015 issue Christianity Today has a picture gallery of an array of such “decrossed” church buildings. They appear sadly deprived.) One never knows in China. Is the Wenzhou campaign a provincial trial balloon? Or is it the first phase of a nationwide anti-Christian or even generally anti-religious policy? President Xi has moved in a more centralized, authoritarian direction. Whatever the future course of religion policy may be, it will likely involve further secularist privatization of religion.Privatization of religion has been interpreted by secularization theorists as a dimension of modernity. This has been much more difficult following Jose Casanova’s seminal work Public Religions in the Modern World (1994). As my teacher Carl Mayer used to say: “Here one must make sharp distinctions.” Secularity, a discourse without any religious presuppositions, is indeed a prerequisite of any modern society: If the famous white “popemobile” breaks down, an urgent call will be made to the nearest car mechanic, not the nearest exorcist. This will not prevent the Pope from proceeding to the next beatification ceremony or some other strongly supernaturalist project. Secularization theory was not wrong in interpreting secularity as a powerful modern discourse; it was wrong in supposing that the discourse is hegemonic. Empirically correct or not, secularity refers to a putative fact. By contrast, secularism is a value, a desideratum. In the three countries briefly dealt with above, secularism is propagated by different actors. In the U.S. secularism is advocated by a quite small minority of ideologues (reincarnations of 19th-century village atheists), who would have a hard time winning an election, and therefore turn to the federal judiciary, the least democratic of the three branches of government. In France, a much less religious country than the U.S., secularism in the form of laïcisme has a broad popular following. Its future will strongly depend on the integration or lack thereof of France’s Muslim population, the highest in Europe. China is an immensely complex society with a secularist elite (in my hunch, more Confucian than Marxist in its attitude toward religion). The future will likely depend on the outcome of power struggles within the elite, and which religion policy will be in the interest of which faction. Looked at in global perspective, and in view of the growing percentage of the religious in the world population, secularist projects do not have a promising prognosis. (Whoever you are, don’t necessarily be happy about this: Don’t forget the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Give me the village atheist any day!)

Iran’s Supreme Leader Throws a Bag of Wrenches

With less than a week to go before the nuclear negotiation’s June 30 deadline, Iran can’t seem to take yes for an answer. Despite tireless (some are saying desperate and counterproductive) efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry to make a deal happen, Iran’s Supreme Leader appears to be doing his utmost to cause a breakdown. Ayatollah Khamenei took to Twitter to state seven Iranian red lines:

#Iran's Major Red Lines in Nuclear Negotiations.
#IranTalks pic.twitter.com/RlHL9BXklm

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) June 24, 2015

The Ayatollah elaborated his conditions during a live broadcast on Iranian TV, but the heart of his remarks (as they’ve been translated so far) remains the same: “Freezing Iran’s Research and Development (R&D) for a long time like 10 or 12 years is not acceptable” and “All financial and economic sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. Congress or the U.S. government should be lifted immediately when we sign a nuclear agreement.”So at the eleventh hour of the nuclear negotiations, we have reached the point where the Ayatollah’s demands become a bit like the menu in the old Monte Python sketch: “Spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam… baked beans are off.” All there is is spam—and by spam, he means sanctions relief.So what is going on here? It may well be, as TAI editor Adam Garfinkle has predicted, that the Supreme Leader, for internal reasons, won’t take “yes” for an answer. In other words, this might be a list of poison-pill demands, designed to make the agreement unacceptable to the United States and/or its allies. (Incidentally, Garfinkle added that it would be a good thing for the U.S. if the Iranians to be seen to be the ones walking away. If the negotiations do indeed break down, these demands may make the Ayatollah look tough at home, but they will help the U.S. a lot in the global optics battle.)But there are other possibilities, too. U.S. concessions have mounted with dizzying rapidity in recent weeks, and now insiders are telling Reuters that Secretary Kerry is oozing desperation out of desire to secure a personal legacy. (Last week, we noted that Western diplomats have been saying the same of the Administration writ large.) Do the Iranians think they have such a strong hand—or such a psychological advantage over the Administration—that they might realistically get a large portion of this just by asking? (“Well, you can’t have a two year timeline, but very well, what are a few inspections between friends.”)Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, the Group of Five is far from united, with France (increasingly close to Saudi Arabia) staking out a hard line and promising to stick to it. Then there’s the “unseen players” we’ve previously discussed, who are not formally present at the negotiating tables, but whose approval (or at least acquiescence) will be necessary for the deal to stick: Congress, the Sunni Arabs led by Saudi Arabia, and Israel.The Israelis and Saudis already view the negotiations as paving the path to an Iranian bomb; acceding to any of these demands is not likely to soften that view. Remember, the deal is only worth it if Israel doesn’t decide unilateral military action is its only remaining hope, or the Saudis don’t decide to go nuclear themselves. Meanwhile, due to Corker-Menendez, some of the Iranian demands (particularly the immediate lifting of “U.S. Congress” sanctions the day the deal is signed) are outright impossible under U.S. law. Furthermore, the overall spirit of these demands as a whole is so blatantly contrary to the purposes for which the U.S. entered into negotiations that it would likely make it very difficult for Congress, including Congressional Democrats, to sign off on a deal signed under them.Iran has often benefited during the nuclear negotiations from its two-tier authority system—President and Supreme Leader—which among other things allows for deniability and good cop-bad cop ploys. Now the Ayatollah has stepped forward at almost the last minute to throw a whole bag of wrenches into the works. Much will depend on how the Administration and the other parties respond. One thing is for sure—we’re in for an interesting week.

Europe’s Immigration Consensus Fraying Badly

Migrants hiding in the back of trucks in Calais. © Getty Images

In the ever-escalating war of words over immigration in the European Union, Hungary has taken a series of decisive steps. Bloomberg:

The government halted its participation in the Dublin Agreement, which governs the transfer of refugees within the European Union, according to a statement on the cabinet’s website Tuesday. Austria summoned the Hungarian envoy to Vienna and the European Commission asked for “immediate clarification” on the move.

“Hungary’s immigration infrastructure is overloaded, it’s shouldering the biggest burden among EU member states,” the Interior Ministry in Budapest said in the statement.Orban has threatened to close all refugee camps in the country and is planning to seal the border with Serbia with a four-meter high fence. The government has also started a billboard campaign calling on immigrants to respect the country’s laws and not to take jobs from Hungarians, which the United Nations and opposition parties said is stoking xenophobia.

In very broad strokes, the Dublin Agreement stipulates that the country where migrants are first registered is also where their final asylum status must be decided. Though Hungary is rarely the final destination for asylum-seekers, its borders with Ukraine and Serbia mean that it is in fact processing an outsized number of candidates. The Hungarian interior ministry said it has detained 60,620 migrants thus far this year.

The decision comes after a strike in Calais prompted migrants to take advantage of the chaotic situation to smuggle themselves over into England in the backs of (and sometimes attached to the undersides of) trucks crossing the Channel. The deputy mayor of Calais bristled at the fact that France was being asked to police England’s border:

England has got to realise that it is not our responsibility. The English border is in Calais and I’m requesting, such as (Calais mayor) Natacha Bouchart, for the border to be transferred back in Dover and in Folkestone.

We can’t just accept any more, to be blamed for immigrancy (sic). Again, they want to go to England, they are not coming to Calais, they go through Calais to get to England.

Besides the ongoing mess with Greece, immigration is supposed to be a key topic for discussion at the EU summit that kicks off tomorrow. Italy’s Matteo Renzi, in an interview with La Stampa, said that Europe urgently needs a strategy for handling the crisis. He’s right, of course. But a consensus on the strategy does not appear to be imminent.

UPDATE: Hungary has backtracked on its decision to suspend participation in the Dublin Agreement, saying it was merely asking for a delay.

Bringing Healthcare into the 21st Century

Price transparency is coming to cancer drugs. The New York Times reports that the American Society of Clinical Oncology is working on a “‘value framework'” system to make both the cost, including out-of-pocket costs to the patient, and the effectiveness of drugs more accessible:

“The reality is that many patients don’t get this information from their doctors and many doctors don’t have the information they need to talk with their patients about costs,” Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer of the oncology society, said in a news conference on Monday […]

Some of the sample valuations presented by the society were far from flattering for the drugs involved.

Roche’s Avastin, when added to chemotherapy, had a net health benefit of 16 out of 130 possible points when used as an initial treatment for advanced lung cancer. Its monthly cost was $11,907.87, compared to $182.09 for the chemotherapy alone.

Eli Lilly’s Alimta for that same use had a net heath benefit of zero with a cost exceeding $9,000 a month compared to about $800 a month for the drugs it was compared to in the clinical trial.

When patients get more information about the price of their care, they can make smarter choices about which treatments, procedures, and drugs they want to use. And studies show that when they are given that information, they often choose the cheaper option, lowering costs for themselves and throughout the system. It shouldn’t be so difficult for consumers to access this information, and we find it encouraging to see a medical society working to fix that in its own field. Price transparency won’t fix U.S. health care on its own, but it could help. It can’t come fast enough.

Uber Drivers to California: We’re Entrepreneurs

On the heels of the California Labor Commission’s decision that drivers for the ride-sharing company Uber are employees rather than independent contractors, a new survey indicates that this is not, in fact, the way the majority of drivers see themselves. From Politico:

But before you assume that that would be a victory for the workers, there’s one other key thing to know: Drivers actually disagree with this. A new survey found that by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, workers in the sharing economy consider themselves independent contractors, not employees.

The data comes from SherpaShare, a company founded in 2014 that provides a platform for workers in the sharing economy to organize their expenses and better understand their earnings. (SherpaShare is independent of companies in the sharing economy.) The company’s survey queried 201 drivers, mostly for Uber and Lyft, explained the context of the legal debate, and asked whether the workers considered themselves independent contractors or employees. Sixty three percent considered themselves independent contractors while 35.5 percent considered themselves an employee.

If the data gathered are reliable, it strikes us as silly that the Labor Commission will seek protective policies for workers who do not desire them. As our economy shifts away from the traditional model of long-term, stable employment towards one of individual entrepreneurialism, we need policies that empower these enterprising workers, not shackle them with outmoded classifications.

It has become increasingly apparent that, as technological innovations continue to disrupt and (in many cases) improve our lot, our governmental institutions at best maintain the status quo, and at worst drag us back to the past. Smart policymakers will be keen to thwart this trend.

The Strangest Bedfellows of All

As the U.S. ups “advisor” deployments to Iraq, some of them are sharing bases with Iranian-backed Shi’a militia. Eli Lake & Josh Rogin at Bloomberg report:

Two senior administration officials confirmed to us that U.S. soldiers and Shiite militia groups are both using the Taqqadum military base in Anbar, the same Iraqi base where President Obama is sending an additional 450 U.S. military personnel to help train the local forces fighting against the Islamic State. Some of the Iran-backed Shiite militias at the base have killed American soldiers in the past.

This is, to say the least, strange. And it won’t just look strange to Americans; alarm bells will be ringing all across the Sunni world. Angry Sunni allies are already accusing the United States of acting as ‘the Shi’a air force’ for the duration of the fight against ISIS; the news that we are now sharing bases with them is going to confirm a worst-case scenario in many Sunni minds, and the word on the street will be that the infidel Americans are in bed with the heretics of Tehran.

This perception is not going to stabilize the Middle East. It’s going to make it easier for ISIS and Al-Qaeda linked groups to recruit. It’s going to increase the flow of money and arms from the Gulf to radical jihadis in Syria and beyond. And it’s going to add new urgency to the drive by Israel and Saudi Arabia to work together against American policy in the region. We can send as many officials as we want to the Gulf to tell the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis how much we love them; it won’t do much good.Lake and Rogin go on to point out that some Obama Administration officials have privately expressed worries that the Shi’a might, gasp, spy on U.S. troops at the facility, and that the troops are “at risk”. As for the spying, two can play at that game, and let’s hope the Americans on the base are keeping their eyes and ears open. As for the risk question, who knows? Let’s just hope that the White House knows what it is doing.For better or for worse, the administration is doubling down on its bet that making friends with the Shi’a is the best way to defend American interests at the least risk and cost. And maybe it thinks that displays of good will and support will win some points with the Supreme Leader as the nuclear talks near yet another ‘deadline’. We root for the home team at The American Interest, so we hope this all somehow turns out for the best; we can’t help but wonder, though, what will come next. An American honor guard for the Supreme Leader as he leads the chants at the next big “Death to America” rally?