Entre Nous / Musings of a former Belgian

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others

Left-leaning (but sympathetic --- yes, there are some, among "leftists of the old school") observers of Israel are often astonished at the deep contempt in which the average working-class Israeli holds the country's trade union. The following story may shed some light on the "hows and whys" of this.

Last night the Israel Channel 2 had a show on about labor relations in a chemical plant in the desert town of Dimona. The identity of the company is not terribly relevant: I have seen many similar examples.

The plant was privatized some fifteen years ago. Veteran employees were given new labor contracts that essentially gave them their existing compensation and benefits plus more --- no new employees can he hired under this contract. Less established employees were offered labor contracts rather more in line with prevailing market conditions, while the remainder was let go and their work outsourced to personnel contractors, selected by public tender. There is severe competition among the contractors, and in order to be able to put in the lowest bid, they have to "absorb" serious cuts every year, which they pass on to their employees. As a result, the latter basically earn minimum wage, without any benefits --- and can be dismissed for the flimsiest of reasons. (One particular contractor employee interviewed was involved in an accident that caused serious chemical burns on his feet --- but was pressured by the contractor not to report the accident because his crew would miss out on the "work safety award" bonus. When he refused to comply he was dismissed.)

So much for the "heartless capitalists", who do more or less what one would expect them to do with the hand they have been dealt ("met de hen uitgedeelde kaarten"). Now what about the self-appointed "defenders of the downtrodden", the trade union and the Worker's Council? They work... at getting ever more perks for the "grade A" veteran employees, occasionally manage to get a bone thrown the way of the "grade B" employees, and do diddly-squat ("niks nul de botten") for the contractor employees --- not even represent those who were crealy terminated in an abusive manner. (They are too busy organizing 5-star vacation packages to Thailand for the "grade A" employees: one Worker's Council head honcho proudly told the camera that a festive evening they organized --- contractor employees not invited --- had cost a whopping NIS 750,000, or about US$165,000.)

As a result, you have a situation where employees doing the identical work get wage and benefit packages that differ by a factor of ten --- without any relationship to job performance or economic value.

This latter situation is fairly widespread in older organizations here, both in our bloated "pakidstan" (slang for gov't bureaucracy) and in other organizations that at some point in their existence were something other than private enterprise. I know, for instance, about academic institutions where some veteran technicians and lab assistants bring home more pay than full professors, and others have contractually guaranteed fictitious overtime packages that would imply them working more than 24 hours/day. Some of these employees are whizzes at their jobs and truly indispensible --- and would command hefty salary packages under market conditions as well. Many others basically bum around all day --- in many cases because their specialties have become obsolete (like glass-blowing) and they refuse to be retrained into something new, knowing that in practice they cannot be fired for anything short of felony. (The Workers' Councils will resort to any means fair and foul to block the firing of such employees for demonstrated incompetence or redundancy --- in part because their fear the setting of precedents.) And these may have newly hired colleagues one or two benches down the lab that work their behinds off for a tiny fraction of their salaries, and with no more job security than they would have working for private enterprise.

Unlike many American "conservatives" who see trade unions as an evil in and of themselves, I consider them a necessary evil in the same fashion as counsel for the defendant at trials --- as a vehicle (ideally self-organized and grass-roots) for defending employees against employer abuses. What happens here, however, is that the trade unions --- despite mouthing all the right pious platitutes about standing up for the socially underprivileged --- have degenerated into nothing more than a lobby for defending and even widening the entrenched privileges of a small group of people with plum jobs, and in practice compound on the alleged "social injustice" of "the capitalist jungle market" with the all-too-real social injustice of a nomenklatura.

Benny the Chomsky-slayer

A very pleasant surprise: a Ben-Gurion University student named "Benjamin" seems to have made it his mission in life to Fisk Noam Chomsky. His AntiChomsky weblog is a must.

Also most interesting is his general weblog: Gefen. It always grates on me when a native English-speaker writes with persistent misspellings, but the writing is otherwise very articulate and incisive. The coinage "necro-communists" is priceless, although it invokes memories of one of the most disgusting song lyrics ever 'sung'.
Keep up the good work, Benny!

The 7 reasons the reactionary "left" hates Israel

Worth reading: Why the left hates Israel. Richard Baehr lists seven reasons which he later expounds upon:

1. It is an easy way to express one’s hatred for America. 

2. Israel is viewed as an outpost of colonialism, and an active practitioner of it.

3. Israel is a western nation, and hence can be judged by the left.  Israel is not protected by cultural relativism, as the Arabs are.

4. Leftist Christian churches can escape any lingering guilt about the Holocaust, by turning Israel into a villain.  Some leftist churches hate Israel because they think this will help protect their members in the holy land- in other words they feel threatened.

5. Ferocious Muslim hatred of Israel and the Jews reinforces the natural cowardice of many on the left who go along with the Muslims to stay out of their line of fire.

6. Jewish leftists are prominent in the anti-Israel movement. This opens the floodgates for everybody else.

7. Israel is attacked because the secular[ist] left is appalled by the influence of religious settlers and their biblical connections to the land of Israel, and by the support for Israel by evangelical Christians, and Christian Zionists.

Was Reagan a conservative?

Micklethwait and Wooldridge (of The Economist) consider whether, from a European perspective, Ronald Reagan was really a conservative.

Traditional conservatism was based on six principles:

[1] a suspicion of the power of the state;

[2] a preference for liberty over equality;

[3] unashamed patriotism;

[4] a belief in established institutions and hierarchies;

[5] a pessimistic, backward-looking pragmatism; and
[6] elitism.

This was the creed that [Edmund] Burke shaped into a philosophy in the 18th century--and that most famous conservatives, from Prince Metternich to Winston Churchill, understood in their bones. Mr. Reagan's conservatism exaggerated the first three of Burke's principles and contradicted the last three.

The exaggerations are the easiest to spot. Ronald Reagan did not merely dislike taxation in the manner of the East Coast Rockefeller Republicans who ran his party in the 1950s; he saw government as the enemy. An early patron of Freedom Forum bookshops in California (where they sold books with titles like "The Naked Communist"), he also took a Western approach to individual freedom, whether it was allowing people to carry guns or tolerating a high level of inequality. As for patriotism, conservatives are a nationalistic bunch, but Mr. Reagan celebrated his country in religious terms--as "the city on the hill" that G-d had chosen as the special agent of His purpose on earth.

If Reaganism had been merely a more vigorous form of old-style conservatism, then it would have been more predictable. In fact, Mr. Reagan-- who began his political life as a New Deal Democrat--took a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism.

The heroes of Burke's conservatism were paternalist squires, who knew their place in society and made sure everybody else did as well. Mr. Reagan's heroes were rugged individualists, defined by the fact that they do not know their place. He packed his kitchen cabinet with entrepreneurs who built up businesses out of nothing [...]

Mr. Reagan took an equally heretical attitude to the fifth attribute, pessimism. Churchill famously "preferred the past to the present and the present to the future." By contrast, Mr. Reagan was fond of [Thomas] Paine's adage that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." When Walter Mondale questioned the cost of America's space program, Mr. Reagan proclaimed that "the American people would rather reach for the stars than reach for excuses why we shouldn't."

As for the sixth characteristic, elitism, instead of dreaming about creating an educated "clerisy" (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did) Mr. Reagan was a populist who argued that "'Bedtime for Bonzo' made more sense than what they were doing in Washington." His was the conservatism not of country clubs and boardrooms, but of talk radio, precinct meetings and tax revolts.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge go on to argue that modern American "conservatism" is really a political movement without significant parallel elsewhere. I would go further and argue that it is not "conservatism" so much as Jacksonianism. And Andrew Jackson, after all, was the father of the US Democratic Party, not of the GOP. If only Andrew Jackson could come back from the grave and be in a room with Al "I invented the Internet" Gore, Howard "Yeeeaarrrgh" Dean, or John Flipflop Kerry, I'd love to be a fly on the wall...

Does Bush write his own speeches?

He of course doesn't, which has been one cause of merriment to many. But is he an exception? Well, no: see here and that [sarcasm] bastion of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy [/sarcasm], PBS (part 1, part 2, and part 3.

To cut a long story short: while even George Washington would occasionally invoke the help of Alexander Hamilton when drafting an important speech, Calvin Coolidge was the first president to employ a full-time speechwriter, and every POTUS since then has had an Office of Speechwriting. Even JFK --- a Pulitzer-winning prose author --- relied on them. Ironically, the one POTUS who appears to have needed them the least was Richard Nixon. His erstwhile speechwriter Ray Price relates:

How much of any given speech the president contributes depends entirely on the president, and on the speech. I worked with Nixon; most – my estimate was about 19 out of 20 – of his speeches were not written at all; he’d been a champion debater since high school, and he was more comfortable without a text than with one. Any speech to the nation from the Oval Office, any to a joint session of Congress, was written, as were selected others. His radio addresses were also written; he had much less of a direct hand in those.

When we did do a written speech other than radio it was pretty much a back-and-forth process, usually through about six or seven drafts, with him editing me and me editing him, until we had what he wanted to say in the way he wanted to say it. Somehow, quite by coincidence, every State of the Union [speech] (I did them all) ended up at 14 drafts. [And this was before the days of word processors! -- FB] He often used this writing process, as he did later when writing his various post-presidency books, as a way of refining ideas – if they don’t work on paper, under the discipline of the written word, they probably don’t work, period.

The last statement sounds suspiciously like what I tell my subordinates at work about half-baked technical reports. Of course, the converse of the statement is not necessarily true: there are BS artists who can express themselves just beautifully on paper...

Quote of the day

From a review of In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr:

When Hoover Institution historian Robert Conquest used newly available data from the Soviet Union to update The Great Terror, his account of Stalin’s murderous purges of the 1930s, his publishers asked for a new title. "How about 'I Told You So, You F*cking Fools'?" Conquest suggested.

Go read the whole review.

Merde in France: "They shall not pass!"

Bill of the bilingual blog Merde in France has moved to the group blog No Pasarán! (Spanish for "they shall not pass!"). On today's anniversary of D-day, the blog quotes a 1967 tune by French chansonnier Michel Sardou:

If the Yankees weren't there You'd all be in [Greater] Germany Talking of G-d know what Saluting G-d knows whom Of course, the years have passed The rifles have changed hands Is this the season to forget That one day we needed them? A kid come from Georgia Who didn't owe you a damn Came to die in Normandy One morning when you weren't around Of course, the years have passed We've become friends In friendship, we say of those who were shot That they died for nothing If the Yankees weren't there You'd all be in [Greater] Germany Talking of G-d knows what Saluting G-d knows whom

Si les ricains n'étaient pas là Vous seriez tous en Germanie A parler de je ne sais quoi A saluer je ne sais qui Bien sûr les années ont passé Les fusils ont changé de mains Est-ce une raison pour oublier Qu'un jour on en a eu besoin Un gars venu de Géorgie Qui se foutait pas mal de toi Est v'nu mourir en Normandie Un matin où tu n'y étais pas Bien sûr les années ont passé On est devenus des copains A l'amicale du fusillé On dit qu'ils sont tombés pour rien Si les ricains n'étaient pas là Vous seriez tous en Germanie A parler de je ne sais quoi A saluer je ne sais qui

Good night, Ronald; Good night, William

Two moving obituaries on Tacitus' website: popular historian and Churchill biographer William Manchester, and now Ronald Reagan (timeline of his life) both passed away after long and debilitating diseases.

We will never see the third volume of William Manchester's "The Last Lion": apparently he had completed a 100,000 word draft by 1995, when declassification of British wartime secret documents made much of what Manchester wrote obsolete. Being the uncompromising craftsman that he was, he shredded his manuscript and started over from scratch: but disease and now death stayed his hand forever. Two excerpts from the unfinished draft made their way into WW II compilations. Perhaps another historian shall be willing to let his ego take a back seat and complete the draft. (Just like the minor composer and Mozart pupil Süssmayr is now remembered --- if at all --- for completing the 80% finished score of Mozart's "Requiem" KV 626.)

I remember Reagan being reviled among Belgian leftists and leftoids (then including yours truly) with a vehemence rivaling that which they now apply to Bush Jr. (up to and including comparisons with the H-monster), and Belgians of all political stripes condescendingly ridiculing about Reagan's alleged lack of high culture. History gave this "unsophisticate" the last laugh when the "Evil Empire", faced with yet another costly arms race by the Strategic Defense Initiative, collapsed under its own weight. A liberal Democrat who switched party allegiance ("I did not leave the Democrats, they left me"), he was a lifelong believer in the American Dream:

They say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems, that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities. My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view.

May their souls be gathered into the bond of life.

UPDATE: The Gipper and the Hedgehog was written months ago as a book review, but is still a fitting tribute to the "amiable dunce" hedgehog who out-thought all the "nuanced, sophisticated" foxes. Why the title?

[I]n Isaiah Berlin’s essay "The Fox and the Hedgehog" [...] Berlin, musing on an obscure line penned by the Greek poet Archilochus, argued it was a modern typology. Archilochus wrote that the fox knows many things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing. Berlin characterized foxes as running hither and yon, taking actions that are unconnected by any guiding principle and that may even be at odds with one another. "Hedgehogs, on the other hand," writes Schweizer, "relate everything to a single central vision."

Go read the whole thing. And also this moving tribute by his erstwhile speechwriter Peggy Noonan.