Tear Gas Meditation

        A report circulated last week that Palestinian protesters were advising protesters in Ferguson on how to protect themselves from the effects of tear gas. True or not, they hold two other severe conditions in common.  Thirty-nine percent of young adults in the Occupied Territories are unemployed according to the World Bank.   In Ferguson the Wall Street Journal reports Black youth unemployment at 31 percent.

        Ferguson and Palestinian young adults also share the reality that they both are at-risk of violent death.  Mother Jones magazine reported on four unarmed Black persons (three of them young adults) who were killed in a single month by police last summer.  Three days ago in Cleveland a Black twelve year was shot dead by the Police.  The Israeli Human Rights group, B’tselem, has posted video surveillance footage showing young unarmed Palestinians shot dead while walking in their West Bank town of Bitunya. Another video shows the Israeli military sharpshooter firing the shots at the same moment.  [You can see too: <b’tselem.org>]

        Behind the lethal gunfire and smoke is the economics of inequality translating itself as the politics of class and race.  Some of this is waged on our streets or in troubled grand jury reports, some of it in unfair labor practices.  Last week truck drivers in the ports of Los Angeles and Long  Beach, California [the two largest ports in the U.S.] struck seven companies that categorize the truckers as independent contractors, described by Rutgers Professor David Bensman as

"a ploy that relieves the companies of the responsibility of employers. They don’t have to pay payroll taxes, don’t have to contribute to unemployment or workers’ compensation funds, don’t have to respect labor and employment laws: no right to unionize, no health and safety protections, no freedom from discrimination."  

       This almost ubiquitous practice among employers of millions of American workers is a script for their impoverishment.  The good news is that major unions like the Teamsters, Change-to-Win and SEIU are finally breaking these unfair labor practices, but it’s taken seven years to do it.

       The unavoidable current reality is that growing inequality is the real background of our current social, racial and political chaos.  The “haves” feel the pressure and tighten their grip on their own advantage. The “have-nots” become more and more desperate and more vulnerable to scapegoating explanations for their plight.   The dismal facts are that a growing percentage of American jobs now pay less than a living wage.

       Even in the manufacturing sector, supposedly where the better wages are to be found, there is actually a wage decline. The National Employment Law Project reports that in 2013 the average factory worker made 7.7 percent below the median wage for all occupations. 

Even where U. S. manufacturing seems aglow—as in the auto industry renaissance of the past three years—“more than 600,000 manufacturing workers in the auto parts industry make just $9.60 per hour or less.”   If the best production jobs pay so little, the rest will pay even less.  This has the potential to put everyone at each other’s throats. Given that the top 10 percent of U. S. population now controls 70 percent of all wealth in the U. S. a rising tide of resentment is now searching in places like Ferguson and Iran for answers which cannot be found there.  

        If  we've lived anytime in the past hundred years this should fill us with dread.  An old aphorism popularized by author William L. Shirer writing about the rise of the Nazis, leaps back to mind “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it.” [originally penned by philosopher George Santayana]   Turning Muslims into generic terrorists, or attacking political leaders seeking to create just immigration reform by calling them destroyers of the Constitution, smacks of the Nazi remedies of the 1930’s and 40’s.  

This Week's Teaching Moment

        Now, in the fear that your own neck may be at risk, it's time to take a crash course. You can begin by making a list of the inflamed areas of the Middle East: Syria, ISIS territory in Syria and Iraq, Iraq itself, Afghanistan, Somalia; and of course the West Bank, Gaza and Israel where four rabbis were tragically murdered yesterday in Jerusalem.  Watch Israeli Prime Minister Netanuahu closely who will surprise us all if he does not go out and immediately kill more people, Palestinians that is. It's one of his favorite remedies.

        First, monitor the news in order of public perceived impressions. Count the items about dead and injured in the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper.  Do it for a few days, better for a week or so.

         Next, for the sake of everyone’s neck remind yourself of this Summer’s carnage in Gaza--that after the July-August 2014 war the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported

“2,189 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed, of whom 1,486 are believed to be civilians (513 children, 323 boys and 190 girls,70% under 12), 269 women, 557 identified as militants, and 146 of unknown status. The IDF calculates 2,127 killed claiming 55% were civilians and 45% militants. Israeli casualties consisted of 6 civilians (including 1 Thai national) and 66 soldiers, 5 of whom reportedly died from friendly fire.    

          Now read OCHA’s report for these two past summer months, just for the West Bank, not including Gaza.  It counts 39 Palestinians killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli live fire.  You can read it all at http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_the_humanitarian_monitor_2014_10_03_english.pdf

         Finally, take a look at the web site of the Israeli Human Rights organization, B’Tselem, at www.btselem.org     Click on “Updates” and read down a page’s length or so. Don’t miss this item:

Israel holding more than 470 Palestinians in administrative detention

In May 2014, B’Tselem cautioned that the number of Palestinians held by Israel in administrative detention was rising. At the end of August…there were some 473 administrative detainees – the highest number since April 2009. Administrative detention is detention without trial. The [Israeli] security establishment uses it extensively, in breach of the restrictions placed by international law. The government of Israel must release all administrative detainees or prosecute them, in accordance with due process.

Yes, you read it right, 473 Palestinians held in prison, the highest number in five years. Held without trial.

There is only one thing left to do: The U. S. government, including President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, and Congress, must redefine their corrupt alliance with Israel. The whole world is watching, but they're not waiting.  Israel itself could perish if she does not become an honest woman. The same for the USA.

Too much reading for you?  It’s your neck, and your children’s and your grandchildren’s.

Prelude to Disillusionment

      We may credit biblical literature for making magical thinking a way of life.  Whatever cannot be resolved in practical concrete terms (money, property, illness, marriage) can be moved to the magic table: a mixed realm of angels and demons that includes imagination and transcendence, delusion and hypocrisy.

       Tuesday’s election displays the magic table in one of its more demonic forms. Behind the strong vote for a Republican takeover of both congressional houses is the hope--one more time--that the world of our favorite dreams whether of wealth or a familiar peaceable kingdom will come true. 

       Illusions abound all around: Our hi-tech industry cranking out trillions of dollars of products via millions of passive workers from China to Silicon Valley; all the while the pool of the permanently unemployed grows around the world and middle class incomes remain flat over ten years. It’s all buttressed by a pantheon of angels and saints—from Moses and Muhammed to Bill Gates and Mark Zukerberg.

      

       Then there is the favorite U. S. Middle East delusion: that Israel’s massacre of 2100 Palestinians, including 500 children, is unconnected to the decline of Iraq and the rise of ISIS. Americans, passing by on the other side of the road, are asked to see no connection from Isis and Iraq’s disintegration to their forgetfulness of the vast tracts of Palestinian land stolen by Israel and now planted with 500,000 settlers.

       As illusionists, both Republicans and many Democrats leave the ominous Piketty inequality equation un-addressed. That’s the equation illustrated by Paul Krugman and others:  today a single Hedge Fund manager makes more than all kindergarten teachers in the U. S. combined. “The top ten percent of wealth holders--own 75 percent of the Capital  and 50 percent of all income.”

Economist Piketty’s equation spells out a frightening anti-democratic future. “The likely [predicted] decrease in the rate of growth of both the population and the economy,” he says, "is potentially terrifying….especially since it is occurring on a global scale.”    [see Thomas Piketty, Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century—the bombshell analysis of two hundred years of estate taxes in eight countries]

       This means that contrary to the illusionists who carried the day in Tuesday’s election, an ominous prelude to disillusionment is being written. People are already frightened into becoming gun-toters and carry in their DNA the latest racist mutations (thirty-five percent of Americans are reported to still believe Obama was born in a foreign country).  We seem ill-prepared for the world of law, negotiation and compromise that are inevitable in a more just globalized economy; unprepared for a harsh truth about the new ground where the imagination for justice must find roots.

        There is this to learn about the difference between magical thinking and an ethic of justice for all. Retrospective scribes and gospel writers usually over-wrote and distorted the engagement between a prophetic Jeremiah or Jesus as they confronted the hypocrites of their day. Harsh truth-telling has been submerged in a sentimental magical glow. Now that the elections are over who will speak truth over against falsehood? To do so goes against the latest happy tide of Republican victory. It can even  even be an act of faith right out of the prophetic tradition with the scribes' glosses removed. Otherwise glowing promises, either Republican or Democratic-style, will lead to dangerous disillusionment.  It’s already happening and yes, it's very, very dangerous.