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.