A Monument Worth a Thousand Men

The Hebrew name “Gilad” means “monument” in English. What sort of monument is worth trading over a thousand incarcerated men? What sort of man is worth a thousand others?

Monuments are symbols, and through this lopsided trade, Israel puts a largely symbolic issue to bed, and Israeli leaders get to claim credit. Hamas scores a great victory for the time-honored strategy of holding a symbol hostage, and its leaders are emboldened across the Palestinian territories. On its face, that’s all there is to it. But I suspect there’s much more.

First, consider the current Israeli government’s position. Social upheaval that has little to do with Palestine has threatened to upend its fragile coalition of callous warmongers and religious zealots. International pressure has been mounting at the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state, define the borders, and end the fighting, thus ending a status quo that has had over 40 years to cultivate beneficiaries in government, the military, and civil society, including about 500,000 armed and increasingly radicalized settlers on Palestinian land.

Then, consider Hamas’s position. Persecuted in the West Bank, mostly exiled to blockaded Gaza, Hamas has lost all of its clout, while its rival Fatah has been at the international negotiating table talking deals it neither likes nor can take credit for. The unending isolation of blockade has worn down Gazan morale, and weakened Hamas’s ability to effectively run its schools, hospitals, and police to tamp down fringe elements. Its own callous warmongers and religious zealots grow restless. Their one saving grace is the hostage they’ve held for over 5 years, and the massive political upside potential of a thousand freed brothers in arms from his release.   

So an exchange happens. Fractious Israel gets a symbolic victory that unites the nation behind the one institution they hold in common—the military. Waning Hamas uses overt hardball tactics to free a thousand men, many of whom are considered heroes of the resistance back home even as they served multiple life sentences for terrorist acts.

Wherever you stand on these matters, the thousand-to-one trade is fairer, and more cynical, than the world gives credit. The point is not to look at the three orders of magnitude between one soldier and a thousand prisoners. Look instead at the brokers of the deal, and what they stand to benefit.

Hamas’s position is easier to understand. A thousand men for one symbol in captivity. Its most promising leaders, long incarcerated, now free to fight for the cause. Compare a thousand liberated warriors, many of whom are famous, to Fatah’s symbolic overture towards the UN. Hamas gets results. Fatah’s technocrats look ineffectual. Hamas is enjoying a revival of proportions that were unimaginable a month ago. Marwan Barghouti, often described as Palestine’s Mandela, now walks free. He's part of ongoing negotiations with Fatah.

Israel’s position is more complex. First, forget about whether you think there ought to be a peace deal and what its terms should be. This isn’t about getting closer to a peace deal. It’s about holding out for the best possible price. Ever since Ariel Sharon pulled Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza, Israel has endured a few rockets on an immigrant town in the desert in exchange for building thousands of new homes on occupied territory. Hamas was relegated to Gaza, while Fatah operates in the West Bank, effectively splitting the Palestinian cause, and a peace deal is no closer than it was when Sharon took office in 2001. That’s ten years of continued policy in exchange for one miserable strip of land that nobody wanted anyway.  

Giving Hamas what it wanted means that Israel no longer has to change. Israeli public opinion feels good about brining one of their boys home, and there’s an election next year. Its negotiating partner for peace suddenly has a radical internal rival to contend with. Soon enough, the terrorism will start again, and Israelis will forget about economic inequality and labor strikes.  For Israel, an enemy flush with victory is one you can fight with a moral authority the world recognizes. And the settlements will continue to grow.

If all goes as planned, and this moment propels Hamas’s warmongers and religious zealots into action, then nothing new will get done. More attacks on Israeli civilians mean more justifiable repression and retribution. It will be another ten years before negotiations are talked about, and meanwhile, the settlements will continue to grow.

The only way out is if Hamas embraces non-violent agitation. A thousand freed men is a real victory. Let’s hope one of them is someone the world will build monuments for.

Time for the Inside Game

Let's get real.

Protests will give a movement credibility and clout, but they're hard to do when the weather's bad.  Deny it, but winter in the States ain't a river in Egypt. Can you imagine occupying Wall Street in January, when the wind chill between the Lower Manhattan skyscrapers reaches polar proportions? Not so much. Maybe Occupy LA will have better luck. I say protest while the weather's good, but now is the time to make plans for the "inside game." Here are two thoughts:

1. For a while now, I've been ranting into the ether about how the working guy needs an association, just like retired people have the AARP, and people in the egg industry have the American Egg Board. Associations are how things get done today. Good thing someone's thought of it.

In a time where labor demand is highly dynamic and easily subsitutable by "inputs" from elsewhere, labor needs to look beyond unions. We cannot reasonably expect people who hold temp jobs at the mall during the day, and make ends meet delivering pizza at night to join a union. But those are the very people who need representation in Washington and their own state capitals the most.

Working America is (surprise surprise) an association for people who work. Its ranks have swelled in recent weeks with the sudden attention to working people. It's the AFL/CIO's attempt to reach out to the non-unionized workforce. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's a good vehicle for organizing people away from the reams of labor law and regulation, the oversight of (and cooptation by) management, and the confines of calcified union rules.

2. A second part of the inside game will be in making changes to the system that we can agree on as a nation, thereby broadening the appeal of the movement to include people with different politics, but similar interests. In my last post I spoke about "a constitutional amendment to shore up our democracy, reduce the influence of powerful interests, free candidates from their parties, encourage greater participation in civil society, and ensure that everyone who can vote has the chance to do so." A constitutional amendment push demands high levels of activism in both state and federal government. Organizing for such an end could have tremendous secondary effects.  

Many, if not most of us can agree that our voices, conservative, liberal, whig, no-nothing, and know-it-all, have been muted by those with unfathomable money and influence. As I mentioned before, there is a collaborative effort with a Harvard ethics professor and a Tea Party leader to start thinking about constitutional changes that would benefit us all.


There is also Get Money Out; a group dedicated to making an amendment happen, complete with membership, verbage, and its own lobbyists. Sign up, if that's your thing.


Fall is here, and winter's not far behind. Time to get your (inside) game on!

How to Get 99 Percent of Us to Agree

The Occupy Wall Street movement and its analogues across the country tell us that they represent the 99 percent of this country who aren’t plutocrats in control of greatly outsized wealth and power. I believe them. I think I’m one of them. I just don’t agree with every placard raised, or all the manifestos in circulation. Really, I don’t really agree with any of that stuff much beyond the limbic satisfaction that comes from rooting for the home team. Others agree far less.

Placards and manifestoes are fine in their own way. Slogans and statements are things that people can coalesce around, ideas that harmonize the necessary chaos of individuality. But the world is too complex to adopt slogans as policy. Tradeoffs abound. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Single payer health care tomorrow means millions of insurance company employees out of work today. No nuclear means more coal. Immigration reform probably means punishing some people, and letting others break the law for the greater good.

At some point in its early stages, every mass movement must strike some balance between the general and the specific. A 36-point declaration will put people off right away, and empty sloganeering will cause a slow erosion of support. And yet, to influence the world you need lots of people agreeing on at least a few things. To get lots of people agreeing on things, they have to be clear and simple. But “clear” and “simple” are kissing cousins to “rigid” and “obtuse.” When they are rigid and obtuse, they can have disastrous consequences. Consider the famine and hardship that arose out of China’s Great Leap Forward, or the endlessly unproductive War on Drugs.  

The good news is that there is a solution to this dilemma. It’s called democracy. There’s something we can all agree on. I don’t know about 99 percent, but certainly 80 percent of us feel that there is too much money in our political system. Some of us feel that corporate money threatens to bankrupt our government through overpayment on things like Medicare and defense. Some of us feel that corporate money strips away the basic protections that labor has fought so hard for. Most of us are tired of the limited choices on offer at election day. All of us want something big to change.

We may not agree on the specifics, but democracy is the common thread between people who show up at Tea Party rallies, and those now showing up on Wall Street. We all feel like it’s being taken away from us by money. We disagree on why, but we all feel like we are not in a fair fight, that our work is increasingly fruitless, and that nobody on top gives a damn. Most of us would prefer to fight out our differences in the squared circle established by the founders of our nation, not in some Tahrir Square moment of absolute upheaval.



Consider This

My proposal: A constitutional amendment to shore up our democracy, reduce the influence of powerful interests, free candidates from their parties, encourage greater participation in civil society, and ensure that everyone who can vote has the chance to do so. But those are just my ideas. It would be important to have representatives from across the political spectrum hash something out. A thoughtful amendment movement could circumvent many of the ideological and cultural battles we are so embroiled in; a good first step towards bringing diverse opinions together to work towards the common good for a change. A Harvard ethics professor and a major figure in the Tea Party have already started to lay the groundwork.

We will always disagree, but this amendment is not about picking winners and losers, at least not for 99 percent of us. It doesn’t say who is right or wrong about global warming or gun rights. It changes the rules of the game so that all might benefit. More practically, a constitutional amendment would require intense, bipartisan political pressure on the House and Senate, a mass effort in all 50 state legislatures to ratify the amendment, and could create a structure for launching new political parties and coalitions at all levels of government. It could reinforce our belief in the American system right when we need it most.

(fat)Cat and Mouse

The typical Tom and Jerry episode is a string of of tit-for-tat vollies where Tom tries to flush Jerry out of his hole in the wall using any number of tricks. There's usually a moment of trepidation when Jerry's life hangs in the balance. Then, by some act of hubris, Tom ends up burned, beaten, or bruised, and Jerry has his deservedly smug moment of glory. Finally, the credits roll by and Tom and Jerry are followed up by Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, Sylvester and Tweety, or Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. Each episode leaves the viewer with the assurance that no one was really hurt, but that what they just saw was just one battle in an endless war.

Some of earliest memories for millions of us are of these cat-and-mouse allegories, absorbed on the TV screen with bug-eyed abandon, and washed down with a bowl of Corn Flakes. I am positive that the hours I spent enrapt with these cartoon shorts are at least an order of magnitude greater than the time I devoted to long division or cursive writing. But it's only now that I am beginning to appreciate the lessons they taught. 

What are those lessons?

1. The small guy is nimble and unpredictable.
2. The big guy takes his strength for granted and makes amateurish mistakes.
3. The small guy can be both irritating and a sympathetic character.
4. You can feel bad for the big guy even if you don't want the small guy to lose.
5. Sometimes, often when there's a mutual enemy, they can be friends.
6. Both sides usually have a point, often an existential one.
7. The fight is because they are cats and mice. 
8. The fight is never-ending.

All of the talk of Class Warfare keeps bringing me back to the lessons I learned in front of the TV on Saturday mornings (and Sundays, and most days after school). The Class Warfare declaration is as silly as telling Tom and Jerry not to try to kill each other. As long as there are cats and mice, there will be conflict, sometimes even life-and-death ones.

The essential truth is that cats eat mice, while mice just want some cheese. The core nature of the big guys and the little guys dictates that there will be conflict so long as the two inhabit the same space. It's not a perfect metaphor. Mice would do fine without the cats around, whereas labor would have nowhere to work without capital. But the idea that there are separate, often opposing interests arising out of their positions in the pecking order, seems iron-clad to me. What's good for capital isn't always good for labor, and vice-versa.

The power balance and the necessary trade-offs between capital and labor are always shifting, but the battle continues. Maybe all that TV ruined my imagination, but I can't picture a future where there are no more cats and mice, where all of our interests are harmonized under one ethic or another. There may be an ebb and flow to the tensions, but the game of cat-and-mouse will always be with us.

The good news is we are real people, not cartoon animals. We can see beyond our naked self-interest. We don't need to kill if we're reasonable. Somehow, despite our conflicting needs, we have made enormous progress in labor, wealth, rights, and markets. Life does get better. But it is only through our own version of cat-and-mouse that it does. Game on.