I’d like to draw attention to three different perspectives on the amazing growth of tent cities of protest across Israeli society — one from Uri Avnery, one from Zeev Sternhell, and one from Bernard Avishai. How Goodly Are Thy Tents
by Uri Avnery
FIRST OF all, a warning. Tent cities are springing up all over Israel. A social protest movement is gathering momentum. At some point in the near future, it may endanger the right-wing government.
The massive tent protests currently sweeping Israel, originally triggered by the country’s young, urban middle class over unsustainable housing costs, have morphed into a movement representing a multitude of social justice issues. In fact, during rallies now, one of the most frequent chants is “האם דורש צדק חברתי” – “The People Demand Social Justice.” On Tuesday, protest leaders officially championed a vast array of social justice causes when they presented Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with an expansive list of demands – among them lower taxes, health care reforms and the broadening of free, public education. However, noticeably absent from the demands were any geopolitical, human rights issues related to the conflict with the Palestinians, namely settlements and the occupation. This absence has been noted by particular segments, namely Palestinians, left-leaning Israelis and progressive American Jews (the group to which I belong).
by Richard Wolff
(Originally published on Truthout)
The political posturing around the debt ceiling “crisis” was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those – underlying US economic decline – keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes – two long-term trends over the last 30 years – help also to explain the political failures that now compound the social costs of economic decline. The first trend is the attack on jobs, wages and benefits, and the second is the attack on the federal government’s budget. The first trend enables the second.
An anguished confession by “President Baruch O Bema,” as channeled through Phil Wolfson:
When I took office, I had convinced many of you that I would be honest, forthright, for democracy for all, against big corporate and financial interests and would champion an economic, emotional, cultural and political resurgence and rectification after the greed and near fascism of the Bush years. Many of you thought I would bring honesty back to politics and that I was made of other stuff — good stuff. There was great enthusiasm for my administration and me and I made promises, even vows, that my presidency would be different and usher in a new era of intelligence, capability, and justice. I had spoken clearly and frequently about the environmental crisis, about international corporatism’s grip on the political system, about the need for campaign finance reform. I have to confess: I was posturing to get elected and had no intention of doing anything but supporting the system as it was, promoting U.S. imperial ambitions abroad, supporting global finance corporatism and making sure that the rich folks I truly admired and who helped me out, many of them information age capitalists, would have their interests served.
The popular protests now engulfing Israel, originally spurred by a housing crisis, have quickly morphed into an amalgamation of economic and social demands, leaving many in Israel’s progressive left to wonder exactly how broad these protests now threatening to paralyze Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s leadership will become. Make no mistake; these protests, begun in Tel Aviv by Israel’s young, left-leaning middle class, are awakening the voices of many sectors that have long-been dormant. There is a social reordering underfoot — the 150,000 Israelis who took to the streets in 11 different cities across the country on Saturday, directing their anger squarely at Netanyahu, are a testament to this. (To understand the scope of these protests, approximately two percent of Israel’s population swarmed the country’s streets and public squares, which in the United States would be around 5.5 million.)
While a lack of affordable housing is the rallying cry around which protesters throughout the country began mobilizing, a deeper discontent has been fomenting. Netanyahu’s championing of anti-democratic laws aimed at squelching criticism of the State coupled with continuing economic policies that have widened gaps between the rich and the poor have angered citizens — so much so that they are now symbolically rejecting both by aiming their protests squarely at their leader.
We at Tikkun have been saying for the past 3 years what former Sec. of Labor and economist Robert Reich says below and what Paul Krugman has been saying for the past 2 years: there is no serious budget crisis. Instead, we have an employment and housing crisis. It is true, as Robert Reich says below, that the Republicans have been running with this lie for the past several years in order to prevent the Democrats, when they had the majority in both houses of Congress, and the presidency, 2009-2010, from doing what the country needed: a massive Work Progress Administration (WPA) employment program coupled with a freeze on mortgage foreclosures and a law requiring the banks to renegotiate mortgage interests to what it was when the mortgage was first offered to the buyers. But Reich plays down the huge culpability of Obama and his economic advisors (who could have been Reich and Krugman, and no Republican forced Obama to go with the pro-corporate advisors he actually chose form the start).Obama accepted the framing of the problems that the right-wing had developed, and has for 3 years been mis-educating people about the nature of the problem we face.
Anyone driving through Madison, Wisconsin in April and May would have recognized those nine beeps of car and truck horns, ubiquitous throughout the city: This is what democracy looks like! The mainstream media focused on unions, of course, public and private, coming together in unexpected solidarity, but not everyone realized that spiritual and religious groups played a significant role as well. And here’s something that will challenge your prejudices: evangelical groups were among them. Together with the religious organizations that form the usual progressive “suspects,” they chanted their own variation on a theme: This is what religion looks like. Houses of Worship: the new “public” spaces for political action?
Hotel housekeepers are rarely seen, let alone heard. A neatly uniformed woman pushing an enormous cart of linens, towels, and cleaning supplies down a hallway; the occasional knock on the door and soft cry of “Housekeeping,” when you’ve slept in: this is the only evidence most hotel guests ever get of the women who create the luxurious environs of hotel rooms. But for the past three weeks, Wanxia Ma, a thirty-nine-year-old housekeeper at San Francisco’s storied Fairmont Hotel, has traded in her quiet mop for a picket-line drum, joining other hotel workers in a nationwide campaign to achieve justice for Hyatt workers. Wanxia is one of dozens of housekeepers who have taken leaves of absence from their hotel jobs this summer to speak out about the abuse housekeepers in union and non-union Hyatt hotels face every day. In San Francisco, Chicago, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C., these women are fighting on behalf of workers in non-union Hyatts who are trying to achieve a fair process to form a union without fear of intimidation and threats from management but can rarely speak out for fear they will lose their jobs. Wanxia and her sister room cleaners spend every day meeting with community groups, members of the clergy, and Hyatt customers to tell their stories and enlist the groups’ support.
BREAKING: Congress has agreed on a new debt ceiling plan! Huge savings will come through a Social Security and Medicare reform program that’s also eco-friendly. It’s called “Soylent Green.” Obama: “We’ve always known that the solution to these problems lies in the American people themselves.” Details to follow.
by Richard D. Wolff
The national debt theatrics in Washington — posturing by both parties for the 2012 presidential election — do show the world how badly U.S. politics have become disconnected from economic realities. If indeed, the two parties play out this drama to the point of actually preventing the debt ceiling from being raised, it will block all sorts of government expenditures causing all sorts of damage to recipients of U.S. spending and to the reputation the U.S. has enjoyed as the safest, securest economy in the world. Let’s remember that the U.S. government — scheduled to spend $3.5 trillion this year, of which 43 per cent has to be borrowed — is the largest single buyer of commodities in the world (largest buyer of oil, military equipment, computers, etc.). Cutting back on U.S. government expenditures is just exactly what a crisis-ridden world economy does not need. Nor does the U.S. need what apparently Obama and the Republicans have agreed to, namely significant cuts to spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.