Pro Commerce

Even Handedness

Dateline: Tel Aviv

Last night, the ticker at the bottom of the CNN broadcast said the U.S. State Department is warning Americans to leave Gaza, the West Bank and not to travel to Israel.

The U.S. is trying to create a democratic government in Iraq and the U.N envoy in charge of the mission, Brahimi, called Israel, the only democracy in the region, a poison in the Middle East.

These are supposed to be seen as even-handedness by Arabs.

The problem is: the Arabs in Gaza freed three out of four men accused of murdering three American guards delivering a Fulbright award to a Gazan girl. So the U.S. State Department pretends to be even handed in warning travelers about Israel, where it would be impossible to single out Americans or capture them as hostages (too many and we look too much like everyone else).

The other problem: The U.N. is already seen in the Jewish and Arab world as the greatest anti-Semitic organization since the Third Reich. A U.N. envoy wasn’t really being even handed in gratuitously attacking Israel, he was just being a U.N. envoy doing what comes naturally.

Anti-Semitism in Europe/MacDonald’s

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Dateline: Tel Aviv

I ask the question of many people: “How bad is anti-Semitism in Europe?” Israelis travel a lot, so they discuss this issue among themselves. The answer is a little unexpected. I have data from a recent poll to add to the comments.

The traditional Catholic countries have the highest levels of anti-Semitism: Spain and Belgium. All of Slavic East Europe, including East Germany, is still living in unreconstructed WWII anti-Semitism. France is not much above the European average but, thank goodness, France is getting better slowly. The Protestant Scandinavian North has virtually no anti-Semitism. The exception to all of this is England.

England has a serious and growing problem. A former Israeli consul general to England, that I talked to in Jerusalem, said Jews are leaving England, usually for the rest of the Commonwealthand for the U.S. I checked his data and over the past 30 years England’s small Jewish population has dropped from over 400,000 to under 280,000. A drop of one-third.

A prominent Israeli professor told me that anti-Semitic hostility at Oxford was so great that he and other Israeli professors couldn’t publicly announce their talks. Even then, the talks to small crowds, since the mid 1990s, have required tight/heavy security.

I have been listening to BBC radio for 30 years. It has never wavered from its staunch anti-Israel bias. Recently, the Palestinians sent a mentally retarded boy to kill Jews and he was caught. The BBC, consistent with its thirty year history, accused Israel of making a media spectacle of the boys capture. No mention of the morality of using mentally retard children as suicide weapons.

Has the BBC anti-Semitism made life for Jews in England more difficult? I don’t know the answer.

I do know that NPR has had a strong anti-Israel bias for the past 18 years. Fortunately, for all of us, that is likely to end now that MacDonald’s has taken over NPR’s soul.

Green Grass

Dateline: Tel Aviv

Although I am a good statistician and survey researcher, there is no need for sampling theory to fathom the current state of the Israeli people. This is the case of a jury where the first show of hands on the major trial issue is unanimous – discussions only remain about lesser charges.

Israeli’s have a consensus: green grass is the metaphor.

It started when a grass roots group of people in towns and farms in Northern Israel began building fences to keep Palestinians out. The fence grew slowly, mile by mile, until it became government policy. The government fence is still moving at a slow but steady pace as the politics of the precise route is worked out.

Israeli writers are now talking about the large and rising number of Israeli’s who have family picnics on the grass in the ubiquitous parks. The family picnic is nearly everywhere I look. The fence (wall) is already built in the Israeli mind.

The U.S. and international press talk about the absence of any Palestinian to negotiate with: Arafat is corrupt and two faced. But the reality is that there would be no Israeli left to negotiate with today. Israel is nearly unanimous in the view that the door to Palestine is shut, locked and the key has been thrown away. Palestinians are gone from the Israeli mind.

The new mood of Israel is reflected in the experience of the head of the social science department (whom I interviewed, yesterday) at the leading university. A few prominent Left professors are leaving for positions in Europe. The pile of incoming applications for departmental positions, from outstanding Israeli professors around the world, seeking a position in an Israeli university, is large and growing.

The mood in the streets of Tel Aviv, despite a severe three-year recession that is just now ending, is upbeat. People smile, they are courteous in the extreme, and walk gingerly. The music in lobbies, stores, coffee shops and on buses is upbeat. The sound is 1960s Beach Boys. Yesterday I heard several songs by the Mamas and the Papas. On a bus from Jerusalem with soldiers, business people and a few people in religious dress, the passengers spontaneously sang along with one popular Israeli song, when it came on the radio. People dance in large crowds at the boardwalk on the beach near my hotel and occasionally I see people dance in front of stores with music playing.

That is Israel today. Come and see for yourself.

Monday morning

Dateline: Tel Aviv

I’m still stunned. Having my morning Illy cappuccino at my favorite 24-hour coffee shop, following a long walk, chi-gung and tai-chi (to be able to take long walks) and a swim in the light blue Mediterranean -- the world stopped.

The bustle of the street in front of me on Dizengoff –- strollers, trucks, taxis, motorcycles, the leaves and blue lined white flags fluttering.

A gentle siren sounded at 10am exactly.

Everyone stopped – got out of their cars, off the motorcycles, bikes and let the hand holding the apple they were eating drop to their side; and my fellow coffee drinkers stood up motionless. Only the leaves and flags waved in the wind in silence. A still life 3-D photo. The 40 people in my warm bright world stood at attention for two minutes. Today is Holocaust Memorial day.

My coffee shop, my hotel have tables with stones, flowers and six candles that burn all day for the lost 4.5 million Jews and the 1.5 million children of a missing generation, murdered for being Jews. Like me.

The book I read on the plane that took me half the way around the globe was Yoram Hazony’s The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul Basic Books; 2000.

I don’t believe in portends. I’ve crossed the artic more than fifty times at night, always hoping to see the aurora borealis. I saw it for the first time on this flight. Slow moving curtains of white light in a clear sky from 35,000 feet.

Hazony, in his book, tells the story of Israel's history as a battle between Theodore Herzl, whose own 1896 book The Jewish State proclaimed the idea of an Israel as a political state that would be the guardian of the wandering, hated, butchered, exiled Jews. Herzl formed an alliance with the Orthodox Jews, dying in pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, and with the practical labor-socialists who idealized farming and labor and settled on kibbutzim in Palestine.

The opposition was Martin Buber and the intellectuals who believed Jews were only a spiritual people who must never have an army and could only settle Palestine in friendship with the Arabs. (Despite Buber and his views, the Arabs of Palestine regularly slaughtered the Jews every few years and still try to.) Buber was joined by the German-Jewish Reform community who believed that a Jewish state would hinder their successful assimilation in Germany, France, Britain and the United States.

My father knew and worked with Rabbi Voorsanger, of San Francisco’s Temple Emanuel, who opposed a Jewish State and my father knew S.F. Congressman Julius Kahn who passed Congressional resolutions against a Jewish state.

I heard Buber speak at the University of Chicago as a student. Not about Israel. My closest friend’s mother, in 1954, was national president of the American Jewish Committee, an organization which still at that date opposed the Jewish state as a threat to assimilation of Jews in America.

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Tel Aviv is a great city. A city of commerce –- walking boulevards, bustling shopping streets everywhere, clean, Bauhaus and skyscraper modern. The bus system is magnificent and ubiquitous. To my surprise, buses have velvet seats like Japan.

I gaze directly in the eyes of about 500 people a day on my 4-8 mile wandering walks around Tel Aviv. There is very little graffiti, one or two homeless, three or four beggars. The music in lobbies, coffee shops, on the street, is upbeat. People are courteous, cars give way to pedestrians and Sonie (my lover) will be happy to know most people obey pedestrian traffic signals. The city is as safe as Tokyo. One of my 83 year old interviewees walks home from the theatre at midnight without a second thought –- so do young women I see alone at that time.

DVD business

Dateline Tel Aviv

Yesterday I talked with the owner of a DVD business. He has three stores, and 17 vending machines that sell DVD’s on the street 24 hours a day. Each machine lists over 120 different DVD’s. The business has 15 employees.

All the profit is in the vending machines --- the stores give the owner something enjoyable to do each day, while staying current with the market. The gentleman suggests that Israeli’s spend less time on the streets because they spend more time with the Internet and with videos at home. His evidence is that the day of the year with the largest DVD sales is Yom Kippur, the day when Israelis traditionally stay indoors. The day with the lowest sales is Independence Day when Israelis are out in the streets barbequing.

Tel Aviv has its version of tow trucks for impounding autos. The trucks are side-mounted forklifts that pick up the car with the forks and put them on the truck bed.

Reporting from Israel

I am off to Tel Aviv today. My loyal readers may notice a few less entries, as I try to blog from Internet cafes.

I get about 1,000 readers per week, of which 700 appear to be regulars. These seem like large numbers to me. I feel some sense of responsibility to talk about what I do and why.

I’m going to Israel because I am a fanatic about institutions. Israel is where I think new institutions are evolving.

Israel is the place because it is new. The first really new society that is fully in the Enlightenment. The population is very diverse, enthusiastically democratic, mostly immigrants, very well educated, technologically competent and deeply immersed in commerce. These are the ingredients of a modern society that can experiment with all institutions ranging from democracy to the arts.

This is the right time. It seems to me that Israelis have been through the first period of peace, the mid-1990s when they thought that a Palestinian peace treaty was just around the corner. The Israelis are now in the second period of peace where they realize the Palestinians are barbarians, never to be part of Israel and it is time to continue building a wonderful society without giving them any more thought.

I’ll meet as many people as I can and report back what I find.

"Brown Sugar"

I regularly chide lefty fundamentalists for their religious closed-minded blindness. One of the most disturbing parts of the lefty fundamentalist tenets is the inherent belief that Americans of African heritage are slightly inferior. I wrote about it in my blog of April 5 where I discussed how the term black has become derogatory.

Now, the ruling guru of lefty fundamentalism, the man nearly all lefties turn to for their daily political catechism, has shown his true plantation racist colors. Here it is from today’s NYTimes:
“Testimony Provides Breath of Racial Reality for TV
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: April 9, 2004”

Re: Condoleezza Rice, “The liberal political satirist Garry Trudeau had Mr. Bush calling her "Brown Sugar," in a Doonesbury cartoon strip this week.”

I’m glad I am not now and never was a Lefty Fundamentalist, though I used to enjoy reading Doonesbury.

The only web search that turned up on this issue was the Independent Women’s Forum that asked why no black leaders and no newspapers, that run the Doonesbury racism, have commented on it.

S.F. Chronicle tells weird story

Read the Chronicle story about a recent land gift from Pacific Gas and Electric, then return here for the juicy facts.

Back in December I was crowing about an extraordinary victory I had as an expert witness for the Greenlining Institute. Greenlining represents urban minorities, immigrants and low-income people.

I was hired by Greenlining to find out about a rumored deal between Pacific Gas & Electric, the Calif. Public Utilities Commission and some environmental groups. The deal was secret. Secrecy in this case is questionable public policy since the deal was a good faith offer of PG&E land for a $5 billion increase in electricity rates. The offer was intended to help get PG&E out of bankruptcy (they are still not out).

I tracked down the secret deal, analyzed it and wrote a filing that protested the following points: About half the 1200 lots in the deal were too small (unconnected 2 acre units) to be environmentally valuable. These small lots were presumably to be sold to pay for the maintenance of the remaining watershed acreage. However, the lots I looked at (and photographed from the air) would all be controversial because they were near cities or towns that would squabble over their sale, demanding that the lots be made into small parks.

The core offer of 140,000 acres of watershed land was not a good deal either. It was held and maintained by PG&E before the offer and was now about to become a cost to California taxpayers. The experts I talked to said that empty land costs $800 to $1,000 per acre, per year, to maintain with fire roads and fire protection. The expense that PG&E was passing on to the state of California is over $100 million per year.

PG&E offered a total grant of $70 million to be paid over seven years to take care of this land. To the environmental groups involved in this secret deal, this $70 million looked like a pot of gold for them and they approved the deal.

I pointed out in my filing that the $5 billion in higher electric rates would be born mostly by urban ratepayers and they were to get nothing out of this land deal.

The final solution, better than nothing, was that PG&E kicked in a separate $30 million and agreed to raise a matching $30 million from foundations for urban conservation and parks.

In addition, the Greenlining Institute was asked to recommend a few board members to oversee the money. The recommendations were appointed in March.

That is a far cry from what the Chronicle reported.

Does America have a dark side?

I just attended a Norwegian wedding at the Air Force Academy. Uniforms and swords. The wedding was a combination of two highly driven and successful people (Norwegian offspring). The atmosphere was almost stifling optimism, bonhomie and romantic good will.

Readers who know my earlier writing know that I ascribe a significant amount of America's character to the Norse Vikings. I give major credit to all the other North Sea and Proto-Germanic tribes as well, particularly the Dutch.

The Vikings are my proto-typical Americans.

The peoples who settled America left the grimness of the old world behind and differ significantly in the level of optimism and vigor they brought with them.

What I wonder is: did we "leave behind an understanding of tribal evil" that is currently haunting us?

I ask that, not just because we are optimistic about our prospects in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also because old Europe is rather grim about getting immersed in barbarian tribal battles in the Middle East just as they were about getting involved in the post Yugoslavian blood bath.

I particularly notice the extensive anti-Israel attitude in Europe and wonder how much of this is the grim pessimism that suggests to Europeans that Israel is bound to lose in its battle with evil, its daily battle with tribal barbarians.

Maybe old Europe is right and America has lost or never had an ability to understand the dark side of humans.

Industrial era of peace

Put a traditional, hierarchical, well-organized society together with the productive power of industrial commerce and you might get Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union or Imperial Japan.

That combination accounts for the loss of sixty to eighty million people in the wars and blood hate of the 20th Century.

My question is whether such a combination is likely to arise in the 21st Century.

There are a few small countries that fit the traditional, hierarchical, well organized definition, such as Singapore and Taiwan --possibly Turkey and Persia. There are fairly clear reasons to think that these nations are not potential threats. The big question mark is China.

Your answer to this question of an industrial commercial threat from hierarchical China may depend on whether you think China's aggressive history was the result of Mongol domination or you think that China is currently losing its hierarchical power as industrial commerce expands. Regardless of your assessment, China is constrained by another, post 1950, separate and independent factor: China as an aggressor would be exposed to the nuclear annihilation threat of other global powers. China is not now, nor has it ever been suicidal.

That leaves the world today in a much safer stage than it was at the beginning of the 20th Century.

We will all continue to face the risk of rogue states and tribal anti-commerce groups. However, that threat is not of the order of magnitude of the 20th Century horrors.

The worst consequences to be suffered might be a dirty nuclear bomb in a major city, with half a million dead and a million maimed. That would be tragic but it would be modest compared to the carnage of the last century’s human disasters.

We may be in a stage of post-industrial relative peace.

Is black derogatory?

Has black become a term of opprobrium?

I ask because Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are not viewed as black people. These two leaders seem to me to be the epitome of the American dream --- study, do well in school, work hard and strive for success. America has delivered for both Rice and Powell.

Because they are both in a Republican administration they are no longer seen as black. The same seems to be true of Justice Clarence Thomas. He isn’t black because he is a successful conservative judge.

The pattern I see is that if you follow the American adage to study hard, get a good education and work hard you will succeed in becoming an American success. If you want to be considered “black” you need to fail a bit at the study hard admonition and make good in one of the 20th Century black fields of sports, music or lefty politics.

An example that comes to mind is three professors. Angela Davis and Cornel West are both considered black academics, she because she is a communist and he because he is an anti-Semitic rapper. Thomas Sowell, also a professor, is a prominent academic success but he’s not considered black.

There are dozens of police chiefs and fire chiefs in America who are rarely cited as black success stories. The same is true for two prominent CEO’s, Richard Parsons of Time Warner and Stanley O'Neal CEO of Merrill Lynch.

Then there are ministers. Two Baptists, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are black but the half dozen Catholic, Methodist and Episcopalian bishops in the U.S. with African heritage are not blacks.

The most bizarre phenomenon is acting. Actors who play roles of responsible people, like Bill Cosby or James Earl Jackson are Americans, those few who play roles as bad boys, like Spike Lee, are black.

I’ve worked hard in the civil rights movement every day since I tried to desegregate white barbershops on the south side of Chicago in 1957. The current outcome seems strange to me. Success for people with an African heritage makes them Americans, but the people who are called black successes are in sports, music or are political lefties.

Is this development good or bad?

Hot water in Colorado Springs

I just spent the night in a Wyndham Hotel in Colorado Springs. I particularly like a hot bath or a hot shower. In Japan the public bath is usually at 108 degrees fahrenheit (42C) or higher. Nice.

At the Wyndam, the hotest the shower could possibly have been was 105(41C) degrees. Just a tad over warm.

George Leonard, the journalist, used to explain these pathetic safety dumb-downs as the by-product of the two edged sword. Americans believe in the unlimited potential of technology on the one blade. On the other blade, in court liability suits we hold corporations liable for any accident that happens to an idiot -- because technology should have protected the idiot.

Therefore coffee at McDonalds is not very hot and the hot water at the Wyndham Hotel couldn't hurt a one yearold who might accidentally fall in a bath tub of hot water.

In this case Americans are right about technology. The Japanese have a faucet technology that would protect anyone from water over 105 degrees. The faucet turns as far to hot as it will go, which is 105 degrees. Then you can push a red button which will let the faucet turn much further into the hot zone for those of us adults who like hotter water.

Wyndam Hotels could have nice hot water. They just have to put in the right shower faucets the next time they redo the plumbing or the next time they redo the bathrooms.

The right man for San Francisco

The right man at the right time with appropriate skills can make big changes. He or she can change a city.

San Francisco will be changing its politics over the next five years thanks to Phil Anschutz the founder of Quest (a telephone company) who bought the San Francisco Examiner a month ago.

The Examiner is a free daily, a bold new idea in newspapers that relies on a low budget operation that can profit from ads and a large loyal newsstand circulation.

The paper, in just the past few weeks, has already become the best source of local news that I’ve seen in the fifty years I’ve been reading the local newspapers.

Combine a decent press (meaning not lefty fundamentalist) with the open-primaries we will have starting next spring (that will destroy partisan politics) --- and things will be looking up for San Francisco.