Freedom Line Blog

In an interview with CFIF, Bruce Herschensohn, author, foreign policy expert, Pepperdine University School of Public Policy senior fellow and a member of CFIF’s Board of Directors, discusses North Korea and the responses from the United States and China, the continued crisis in the Middle East and the legacy of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Listen to the interview here.

This week, in an official comment filed with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), CFIF called for reform or replacement of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard endorsed by the GSA.  Americans deserve a building certification system that is more fair, open, evidence-based and that uses consensus-based standards.

Although the issue of forest certification remains rather obscure to most Americans, its regulation significantly impacts the price consumers pay for wood products, not to mention America’s struggling domestic timber industry.  Unfortunately, a vocal group of environmental activists only endorses Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, and prefers it as a monopoly, while irrationally demonizing competing forest certification systems.  Among other things, those activists successfully pressure Fortune 500 companies into accepting the exclusive use of FSC-certified products, and many government and rating agencies to only award green “credits” to forest products recognized by FSC.

That policy causes the market to become increasingly distorted, with real costs for producers of wood and the environment, and fewer choices for consumers.  A recent study by the American Consumer Institute estimated the costs of carrying that policy to its endpoint.  Namely, FSC certification as a binding requirement for American forests means consumer welfare losses in a number of markets, totaling $10 billion for wood products and $24 billion for paper products markets each year.  Another destructive consequence of the FSC monopoly is that wood from almost 75% of America’s certified forests is placed off-limits.  While that single-source arrangement benefits the FSC and activists, it imposes significant costs on the domestic forestry industry and discourages competition.  That’s because FSC holds foreign landowners to lower standards than U.S. foresters.  For example, harvesting 600-year-old Russian trees occurred on FSC-certified property.  Such an arrangement discriminates against domestic foresters and increases the likelihood of builders seeking foreign suppliers of wood.  In fact, 90% of FSC’s certified land is found abroad, making it fairly easy for businesses to access foreign timber.  Typically, the government interferes with the market to ostensibly protect American industries.  Here, sadly, it is relying on an unaccountable third-party to do the opposite.

The current LEED policy also jeopardizes American jobs;  penalizes smaller landowners who use other certification systems;  discourages the use of many common building materials and other products that are regularly found in construction projects, such as PVC piping, foam insulation, heat reflective roofing and LED lighting face.

Meanwhile, there exists little to no clear environmental benefit to using FSC over alternatives like SFI or ATFS.  A recent study published in the Journal of Forestry examined the impact of FSC and SFI forest certification in North America, and found few differences in land management outcomes of those two alternative systems.  Additionally, the League of Conservation Voters, National Alliance of State Foresters and National Association of Conservation Districts also favor a more level playing field for certification.   Those groups possess much better on-the-ground expertise than the activists who come from marketing backgrounds and lack credentials pertaining to land management or environmental science.

We conclude:

We already witness too many government policies picking winners and losers in the marketplace.  For the federal bureaucracy to allow a third-party environmental group to do so is appalling.  Given USGBC’s agenda and arbitrary actions, it is reckless to empower that organization to dictate a government-sanctioned standard, especially when that standard stifles growth and kills off American jobs during this time of economic uncertainty…  LEED in its current incarnation as the government-approved standard is simply unacceptable.  American consumers, small businesses and our domestic timber industry deserve much better, and the era of the USGBC’s taxpayer-subsidized monopoly must end.”

Meanwhile, in an excellent Forbes commentary this week, George Mason University fellow Jon Entine echoes our view.  Entitled “Forestry Labeling War Turns Ugly as Greenpeace Bungles Logging Industry Attack,” Entine neatly examines the contradictions and tensions contaminating the current forest certification regime:

Policies regarding the procurement of timber, use of building codes and what businesses can sell to their customers should be informed by facts and science, not scare tactics. Greenpeace’s deception is only the latest propaganda effort that has muddied rather than clarified the issues surrounding forestry practices. With a majority of forests lacking certification, we need common-sense incentives and more certification options to achieve sustainable forestry management goals. Consumers and the general public deserve much better than the disinformation campaigns that have shadowed this debate.”

Fortunately, the GSA review period offers the opportunity to return credibility to the building certification system.

Don’t look now, but with ObamaCare failing to deliver on its promises before it even takes effect, Democrats are already starting to lay the blame on the one party least responsible for this policy monstrosity: Republicans.

Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services and the point person for ObamaCare’s implementation, told a Harvard School of Public Health audience that instead of saying, “let’s get on board, let’s make this work,” Republican opponents coerced her into fighting “state-by-state political battles.” Sebelius complained, “The politics has been relentless,” according to Investor’s Business Daily.

This from the woman whose refusal to honor the conscience rights of religious employers elevates the right to “free” contraception over the First Amendment.

But just because Sebelius’ charge that ObamaCare’s completely foreseen failure is actually Republicans’ fault is laughable to anyone who knows the facts, don’t assume that the GOP communications apparatus can be counted on to frame those facts effectively.

After all, this is the same universe of consultants and staff that got outmaneuvered last election season on liberal talking points like the GOP’s “War on Women,” and Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment.

If the Left wants to present Sandra Fluke and “The Life of Julia” as exemplars of modern feminism, why can’t the Right counter with the common sense observation that what liberals really want is a government sugar-daddy who pays for sex and then subsidizes any consequences thereafter?

And rather than deny that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, why don’t Republicans instead hit back with the explosive growth of food stamps and the unprecedented extension of unemployment benefits in the Age of Obama?  Throw in the Obama Phone mentality, and people will start to understand that there are real costs to the liberal vision of welfare.

All this to say I hope Republicans have learned their lesson about how to contest Democratic smear campaigns.  It would be a shame if when ObamaCare comes off the rails next year the GOP fails to capitalize electorally because no one clearly makes the case that only liberals are to blame for the mess they created.

Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon has a must-read opinion piece today explaining why President Barack Obama’s policy agenda ignores the economic and employment concerns of millions of Americans to focus on much less salient issues like gun control and amnesty.

In short, to understand Obama’s refusal to concentrate like a laser beam on improving the nation’s economic outlook, one has to remember that the President cares more about wealthy liberal pet projects from the likes of New York’s billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg than about anyone on Main Street.

The Bloomberg style has several distinctive features. The first is a complete indifference to or dismissal of middle class concerns. In this view, it matters less that the middle class is enjoying full employment or economic independence or a modicum of social mobility or even action on issues it finds important, and more that it has access to government benefits generous enough to shut it up.

Recall that in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy Bloomberg was far more interested in seeing the Yuppie-filled New York City Marathon take place, and in linking the storm to apocalyptic climate change, than in mobilizing the combined forces of municipal and state and federal government to take care of the white working class on Staten Island and in the Rockaways. Similarly, Barack Obama has nothing new to say on the economy or deficit, but delivers speech after speech on gun regulations that would not have stopped the Sandy Hook massacre, while his allies in the Senate work to import low-wage labor on the one hand and high-end Silicon Valley labor on the other. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the nation hopes for better days.

Another hallmark of the Bloomberg style is its insufferable condescension. One need only have heard the tiniest whine of a Bloomberg speech to know what I’m talking about. The preening attitude of superiority manifests itself in a form of moral blackmail. Adversaries of the Bloomberg-Obama agenda are not simply mistaken. There is, it is implied, something wrong with them personally.

Sound familiar? You can read the entire piece here.

In an interview with CFIF, Pete Sepp, Executive Vice President of the National Taxpayers Union, discusses Social Security, President Obama’s 2013 Budget proposal and the need for tax reform.

Listen to the interview here.

The New York Times is reporting that new details are emerging about the border security component of the Senate’s bipartisan, self-appointed “Gang of Eight” plan for comprehensive immigration reform.

The following is particularly interesting:

According to the draft, the legislation would provide $3 billion for the Department of Homeland Security to draw up and carry out a five-year border security plan. Officials must present the plan within six months, and no immigrants can gain any provisional legal status until the plan is in place.

The plan must include how border authorities will move quickly to spread technology across the border to ensure that agents can see along its entire length. The authorities will also have five years to reach 90 percent effectiveness in their operations, a measure based on calculations of what percentage of illegal crossers were caught or turned back without crossing.

Homeland Security officials also have six months to draw up plans to finish any border fencing they deem necessary.

The problem with this proposal is that it puts the responsibility and the discretion over how to secure the border in the hands of the very people who are committed to keeping them open.

As I wrote last week, the Department of Homeland Security is refusing to create a metric to track border security. According to White House aides, that’s because President Barack Obama doesn’t want a distracting – and damning – focus on DHS’s failure to capture more than half of illegal border crossers to derail his push for legalization and amnesty.

Simply giving DHS $3 billion to do a job it is already on record as refusing to do is nonsensical.

Now that Congress has found the one area where the Obama administration refuses to regulate, it’s time for the people’s representatives and senators to get back in the game and pass a border security program that specifies in detail what DHS’s job is, and puts in serious penalties for refusing to implement the law.

Bill O’Reilly quite literally has no clue what he is talking about when he trashes New Orleans by effectively endorsing Geraldo Rivera’s ignorant description of everything outside of the French Quarter as a “vast urban wasteland” and directly says that local claims to the contrary are just “putting a happy face on things that aren’t happening.” The fact is that every single word of the citizens’ groups letter to O’Reilly is true. I write this not as a native, but as somebody who has done extensive research on this for an as-yet-to-be-written story for a major publication.

In education, civic reform, entrepreneurship, flood protection, and all sorts of other areas, New Orleans actually has become a model of how to do things right. The Wall Street Journal noted as much in a recent piece, as well. Finally, as for crime, as of about 15 months ago (the last available stats I looked at), the odd truth is that while the murder rate is atrociously high (most of it concentrated in several small geographical pockets, which doesn’t make it okay but does mean that most of the city is far safer than the overall number indicates), the overall rate of violent crime per capita puts New Orleans better than at least 70 other American cities. In other words, rape, armed robbery, etcetera are all well down — and while horrid random acts of violence occur there, as they do in any city, they are actually less common than in many, many other places of the same size.

In short, O’Reilly and Rivera are just plain wrong on this one. The Crescent City is an exemplar not of urban decrepitude, but of hugely successful urban renaissance.

Here’s everything you need to know about the corruption of border security under Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, helpfully summarized in two stats and one quote by Byron York.

“According to internal reports, Border Patrol agents used the airborne radar to help find and detain 1,874 people in the Sonora Desert between October 1 [2012] and January 17 [2013],” reported the Los Angeles Times last week. “But the radar system spotted an additional 1,962 people in the same area who evaded arrest and disappeared into the United States.”

That means officers caught fewer than half of those who made the crossing in that part of Arizona. If those results are representative of other sectors of the border, then everything the administration has said about border security is wrong.

“These revelations are in stark contrast to the administration’s declaration that the border is more secure than ever due to greater resources having been deployed to the region, and that lower rates of apprehensions signify fewer individuals are crossing,” Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote in an April 5 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

New information is coming to light almost daily as members of Congress try to assess whether the federal agencies responsible for ensuring the integrity of America’s borders are, in fact, doing their job.

These revelations of malfeasance are compounded by the secretive deliberations of the so-called “Gang of Eight” as they haggle over an estimated 1,500 page version of comprehensive immigration reform that Democrats are trying to rush through the Senate without formal debate.

The more we learn about how badly the Department of Homeland Security is failing to police the border, the less congressional Republicans should entertain any thoughts about comprehensive immigration reform.

With opposition from Louisiana’s business and religious communities, as well as resistance from Republican state lawmakers, Governor Bobby Jindal announced he will “park” his plan to replace the state’s income tax with a higher sales tax.

The devil was in the details, says Josh Barro, a Bloomberg economics and financial writer.

The other problem was that Jindal’s method of tax-base expansion was not very sensible. An ideal sales tax should apply to all consumption exactly once, meaning it should include business-to-consumer transactions and exclude business-to-business transactions. Taxing transactions between businesses leads to “tax pyramiding”: a sale is taxed multiple times before reaching the final consumer, meaning the tax embedded in the price far exceeds the actual tax rate. This is unfair and also inefficient, because it punishes businesses that choose not to vertically integrate: If I run a restaurant, my customers pay more tax if I buy my pastries from a third-party baker than if I bake them myself. (Depending on how my state taxes pastries.)

Jindal’s administration was bragging that his plan would cause lots of tax pyramiding. An official in Jindal’s department of revenue told the Louisiana House Ways and Means Committee that 80 percent of the new sales tax on services would be borne by businesses. This announcement was meant to be an explanation of how the plan could cut taxes on individuals in all income brackets. But it caused yet two more problems. One, it led the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, normally friendly to Jindal, to come out against the plan. Two, it undermined the case for reform: Sales-tax base broadening is supposed to make the tax base more ideal, but Jindal was effectively announcing that it would not.

For conservatives, it is part of Economics 101 to remind liberals that all taxes paid by businesses get passed on to consumers.  With a statewide popularity rating now lower than President Barack Obama’s, it’s too bad the very bright Governor Jindal had to (re)learn that lesson the hard way.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CDT)/5:00 pm (EDT):  Bruce Herschensohn, American Political Commentator, Author and Foreign Policy Expert – North Korea;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT):  Alex Nowrasteh, Immigration Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity – Immigration Reform;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT):  Sally Pipes, President, CEO and Taube Fellow in Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute – ObamaCare; and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Pete Sepp, Executive President of National Taxpayers Union – Sequestrations vs. 2013 Tax Increase.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

It was October of 2001 at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama. The distinctively clipped, English accent of the speaker was unmistakeable. “The protection of freedom in the world today depends on the global alliance of the English-speaking peoples,” she said.

And, as always, Margaret Thatcher was right.

This was one of the final three or four public speeches that Lady Thatcher ever gave. About six weeks later, it was announced that she had suffered a series of small strokes over the preceding three or so months — indeed, there were signs in Point Clear, as the evening wore on, of a little bit of confusion and repetitiveness from the great lady — and that she therefore would stop giving speeches. But for the first hour or so of the evening, the former British Prime Minister was very much at the top of her game, clear and eloquent and insightful.

Her point was not that English-speaking peoples are inherently superior — far from it. Her point was that the political institutions and cultures of the English-speaking peoples were the ones most respectful of liberty (the only exception, perhaps, is Switzerland), and the ones also most protective of it. The United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and increasingly India, she said, along with a few other scattered former colonies of Great Britain — all with the common heritage stemming from the British republican/constitutional system that began developing with Magna Carta — were devoted to free markets and individual liberty. If these English-speaking peoples do not stand strong for the values of liberty, and are not willing to defend them, then nobody else will do so, or at least not with effectiveness.

It was a very good point. True, and inspirational.

Margaret Thatcher, who served in Parliament with an elderly Winston Churchill, was very much a proponent of this quintessentially Churchillian worldview. Also, of course, she shared Churchill’s revulsion for Communism, especially as exemplified in the Soviet empire. And by the fall of 2001, in a new millennium, she clearly recognized international jihadism as a threat approximately as great as the one the Soviets had posed.

Domestically, meanwhile, she was far firmer than Churchill in favor of free markets, against the excesses of the welfare state and the unionized power grabs, and for limited government.

Many words will be written about what an important and effective ally she was for Ronald Reagan as Reagan led the international alliance that destroyed that Soviet empire. Many words will be written about her stalwart personal character, her courage, her intelligence, and her grace. The laudatory words will certainly be on target. She was one of the great leaders of the 20th Century — or, indeed, of any century since the Enlightenment.

On the very night that Ronald Reagan died in 2004, I happened to be in London. In fact, at approximately the moment Reagan died, I was finishing up a meal at Rules of London, sitting at a corner table, staring at a wonderful wall mural of a very well done imaginary image, somewhat whimsical, of Margaret Thatcher dressed in a suit of armor with an iron lance in her hand. The expression on her face was resolute — and serene in its resolution.

I rather imagine that Thatcher herself probably loved that mural inside London’s famous restaurant. My wife and I certainly did.

Margaret Thatcher was very much of the character of the spirit of the best of medieval chivalry — a female Lord Percival whose heart on all essential matters was pure and whose public virtue was married to unflinching courage.

Today she joined Reagan, and her beloved husband Denis, and Churchill, in the Lord’s joy. May she rest in the Lord’s peace forever.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

I’m just sorry I’m not a resident of Philadelphia, because I would love to be investigated and denounced by the city’s Human Rights Commission, and by the mayor. What a bunch of freedom-killing jack-donkeys.

I refer to this excellent piece by The Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway. In it, he describes how, at the mayor’s urging, Philadelphia magazine has been told to explain itself at an April 18 meeting of the commission, with regard to an article it published called “Being White in Philadelphia” in which white residents complain about how too much of public life is conducted through a racial prism. Fifty years ago, it would have been Martin Luther King Jr. who was making such a point — but now that white residents want color-blindness, the nutty mayor wants to chill the speech of those making King’s point.

There should be a special place in Hades for those who exacerbate racial tensions and who threaten our sacred freedom of speech. The editors of Philadelphia, meanwhile, ought to show up at the commission hearing and, very defiantly, give the mayor and the commission unmitigated hell — and dare them to take any action, of any kind, against the magazine.

In an inteview with CFIF, New York Times best-selling author Joel Rosenberg discusses President Obama’s recent trip to Israel and Jordan, Iran’s nuclear threat, the danger of Syria’s impending implosion and his latest novel, “Damascus Countdown.”

Listen to the interview here.

States looking for flexibility under ObamaCare in how to structure and pay for expanding Medicaid can take a hike, according to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation.

States like Arkansas and Indiana have requested waivers from the health reform law’s expansion formula that creates millions of new enrollees at an eventual cost of billions of dollars to states.

The hope was to use existing state-based models like Indiana’s successful health savings account for low-income Hoosiers to increase Medicaid enrollment while retaining cost certainty for state budget writers.

But those hopes were dashed after the federal Department of Health and Human Services released a frequently asked questions (FAQ) sheet that flatly denied any request to deviate from ObamaCare’s one-size-fits-all, open-ended spending commitment for Medicaid.

With this announcement, the Obama administration has definitively articulated its idea of bipartisan reform.  Republican governors who capitulate and get in line are welcomed with open arms.  Those like Indiana’s Mike Pence can take their policy entrepreneurship somewhere else.

Question: What happens when a majority of countries at the United Nations support a treaty, but delegations representing half the world’s population do not?

Answer: An agreement that won’t be enforced fairly across the globe.

It gets worse.  The dissenting half is made up of the governments most likely to violate the treaty.

The document in question is the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the vehicle of international gun control advocates to monitor and limit weapons transfers between countries.  But while the United States, considered the country with the best such system in place, is now a signatory, serial violators such as Syria, North Korea, and Iran, as well as major arms dealing countries such as Russia and China, are not.

So, what we have here is a treaty that will bind only the governments that already take arms transfer seriously, while having no effect on the governments most likely to violate its terms.

As an added bonus, there’s enough loose language in the treaty to leave room for an enterprising UN bureaucrat or two to create a global firearms registry applicable to every signatory, potentially putting American gun owners’ Second Amendment rights at the mercy of foreign gun control interests.

Not a banner week for the U.S. diplomatic mission to the U.N.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino makes the case for why any serious immigration reform must put our national interests first, including and starting with securing the border.

Quin Hillyer, CFIF Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of The American Spectator, discusses why President Obama’s nomination of Thomas Perez to be Secretary of Labor must be blocked.

Listen to the interview here.