Fair go

In a report released yesterday, the US Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, representing a country built on slave labour, ‘raised concerns about the abuse of temporary guest workers brought to Australia from India, China and South Korea.’

Age Washington correspondent, Anne Davies writes,

…US State Department investigators said they had reports about workers "whose labour conditions amounted to slavery, debt bondage amd involuntary servitude."

…"The Australian Government should devote more attention and resources to addressing allegations of labour trafficking, including in connection with its 457 (temporary visa) worker visa program."

…This included employers demanding repayment of large placement fees, contracts that forbid contact with unions, and sub-standard living conditions.

Back in the land of the free, you don’t have to be a gastarbeiter to get screwed. An advisory panel ruled yesterday not to expedite the application of nearly 3000 former workers at Rockwell International’s Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado.

If there is evidence that they suffer from any of 22 kinds of cancer linked to radiation, they will be entitled to $150,000 in compensation, plus medical benefits, but

Jennifer Thompson, a former Rocky Flats worker who is a spokeswoman for the petitioners, told the panel that it took an average of 742 days to process a successful claim. Sixty-seven workers have died waiting for their benefits to come through, Ms. Thompson said.

[Kevin Moloney for the New York Times]

Charlie Wolf, a former project engineer at the plant who now suffers from brain and bone marrow cancer, said he had waited more than four years before his claim was approved. “It’s hard for me to even read anymore,” said Mr. Wolf, whose bald head is creased by a nine-inch scar from brain surgery related to his cancer.

With poverty standing at 70% in the Occupied Territories, according to UNICEF’s Monica Awad, ‘We see a lot of child labour’.

Thousands of adult West Bankers used to earn a living working inside Israel in agriculture or construction - but they are no longer allowed to enter Israel as a result of tighter restrictions in place since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000.

And Israel's matrix of more than 500 manned checkpoints and roadblocks inside the West Bank makes it all but impossible for Palestinians to travel to find work, NGOs say, while its West Bank barrier cuts many farmers off from their land.

Now only their children can tap into the strong Israeli economy. Unlike their parents, they can easily cross the barrier because children under 14 do not need a permit to get through checkpoints.

"At least a thousand children cross into Israel every day. They are sent out by adults. They also go to garbage dumps and collect metals," said Israeli government spokesman Shlomo Dror.

Younis is among thousands of Palestinian children who miss school and face danger on the streets every day. He and his brothers say they each make about 150 shekels or US$37 a day and are the family's sole earners.

Image Courtesy: © Tom Spender/IRIN

"They stand at dangerous intersections, with lots of traffic. Also, there is a problem of dehydration. They can stand in the sun for 10 or 12 hours," said Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenthal, who added that there was little the Israeli authorities could do to stop them.

More than half of Palestinian children who work and earn a wage do not attend school, according to the PCBS statistics…Children on the street may also face harassment or assault while working, DCI found.

Most of the street children work as vendors or porters in busy towns, although some do hard labour in quarries, DCI said.

The Rs1.8 billion (US$30 million) food relief package for Pakistan’s estimated 71 million poor and vulnerable population announced in last week’s budget turns out to come to just Rs2 per person per month, or roughly 3.3 US cents. Dawn reports that’s not even enough for one roti (flat bread). But since two thirds of the package will be through a subsidy to the government owned network of Utility Stores, those in remote villages not serviced by the Utility Store network won’t even get that much.

Your lips are sealed

With the world’s attention diverted to Venezuela, whose democratically elected ‘dictator’, Hugo Chavez, has not renewed the license of a broadcaster implicated in the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew the elected government and replaced it with a ‘democratic’ junta more to Washington’s liking, Pakistan’s actual military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, yesterday provided new powers to the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA).

[BBC photo]

Just months after parliament had legislated on the relevant issues after years of consultation the new ordinance empowers PEMRA to act against media outlets independent of the committee established for the purpose. Dawn reports

The ordinance authorises the Pemra to confiscate the equipment of broadcasters and seal the premises without consulting a council of complaints.

The council was envisaged in the amendments passed in February. The amendment increased the fine for violators to Rs10 million from the existing Rs1 million.

Some 10 amendments were made in the Pemra (Amendment) Act passed in February this year. An amended sub-section (5) of Section 29 reads: “Provided further that the Authority or the chairman may seize a broadcast or distribution service equipment or seal the premises which is operating illegally or (in) contravention of orders passed under Section 30.”

Freedom of expression as understood in Pakistan precludes criticism of the military or the judiciary, so that is the context in which to construe the expression ‘operating illegally’. Two privately owned television stations, Aaj [‘today’] and ARY One World, had already been denied permission to do live broadcasts under existing rules.

A new provision -- Section 39 (A) -- even authorised the Pemra to make rules and regulations on its own from time to time by simply issuing notifications. It says: “The Authority may, by notification in the official gazette, make regulations, not inconsistent with the ordinance and the rules made thereunder, to provide for all matters for which provision is necessary or expedient for carrying out the purposes of this ordinance.”

As soon as the new ordinance was announced, journalists took to the streets of Islamabad.

[Dawn photo]

Meanwhile, the National Security Council ‘agreed to draw up a multi-pronged strategy to deal with terrorism and extremism and create employment opportunities for the youth, especially in Fata [Federally Administered Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan] and the NWFP [Northwest Frontier Province].’

In a move that would be derided as populist opportunism if President General Musharraf were not such a good friend of the Free World and such a close ally in the war of terrorism, he asserted

…that the new federal budget would be a catalyst in bringing about a qualitative change in the life of the poor and ensuring fast economic development. He said poverty would be brought down and job opportunities created through a record Public Sector Development Programme. He said massive economic development activities would be generated as a result of massive allocations for various development projects.

President Musharraf said the country had achieved record economic growth. He underlined the need for transferring the benefits of development to people at the grass-root level. He said measures would be taken to ensure the availability of essential items at subsidised rates. He said steps were being taken to check price hike, especially of items of daily use. He said measures would be taken to check inflation.

He said salaries and pensions of government employees would be increased.

Doubtless such vacuous promises are very welcome in a country where 65.6% of the population live on less than US$2 per day and 13.4% under $1. A full 26% are under Pakistan’s own poverty line. Which is not really surprising when cops get Rs3000 (US$50) per month and a primary school teacher can earn as little as Rs1200 ($20) a month.

In an apparent rebuff to General Musharraf, Dawn reported that yesterday, the Supreme Court ‘turned down federal government’s request for initiating contempt of the court proceedings against the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) for defaming the judiciary and military at a seminar’.

How the other 0.001% live

‘For many U.S. buyers, stricter lending standards resulting from record defaults among subprime borrowers have made it tougher to purchase real estate’, reports Kathleen M. Howley of Bloomberg News. But

For most Hamptons buyers, it has had no effect, said Judi Desiderio, president of Town & Country Real Estate in East Hampton.

That is because three-quarters of Hamptons buyers do not use mortgages, said Desiderio. "If you're buying a house over $5 million in the Hamptons, you don't even know what the 'M' word means... They're strictly all-cash deals."

… The market in the Hamptons - former potato farms where seagull cries now mix with the sounds of well-tuned Ferraris - is fueled by salaries on Wall Street, 40 minutes away by helicopter, said Diane Saatchi, a broker at Corcoran Group in East Hampton. “… spending millions on a summer home to be near their friends isn't a big deal."

George Simpson, president of Suffolk Research Service, pointed out

"The housing market all over the United States is down, but not here because this is where all the rich people want to be seen in the summertime," Simpson said.

Meanwhile, the US has the most unequal distribution of wealth in the ‘developed’ world, with a Gini Coefficient of 0.45, worse than Pakistan and many other countries. The Land of the Free also boasts the highest poverty rate among industrialised countries, with fully 12% of the population living below the US’s own poverty line.

The sole address

It’s not the first time I’ve mentioned this embarrassing little matter, but it’s come up again, so I just thought I’d rub it in.

When people talk about Israel and Zionism, it’s as inevitable as night follows day that the issue of the Holocaust will arise. It’s almost as if everyone has forgotten that the Zionist movement goes back to the 1880s, long before anyone had thought of the Final Solution. But there is some truth to the assertion that the fact of the Holocaust, or Holocaust guilt, anyway, smoothed Israel’s path to independence and recognition. According to Ilan Pappé’s Ethnic cleansing of Palestine, throughout the period of the Plan Dalet ethnic cleansing operation, there were Red Cross reports and the expulsions got frequent coverage in the press. And nobody said squat. Obviously, we can’t know for sure what would have transpired if everyone wasn’t feeling so bad about the six million.

Anyway, it’s as if Israel was at one and the same time compensation for the Holocaust and some kind of guarantee against another. Of course we know it’s not the latter, because one speaker after another got up at the Herzliya conference not long ago and explained how Ahmedinejad was on the verge of committing another Holocaust, wiping out precisely the Jews in Israel itself.

Anyway, as everybody knows, the Final Solution didn’t turn out quite as final as the Nazis had intended and a significant proportion of the survivors immigrated to the safe haven of Israel. Well, according to a 12 April report in Ynet, more than six decades down the track,

A third of Holocaust survivors living in Israel are poor, the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund reported this week. According to the fund, some 80,000 of the 260,000 survivors in the country live under the poverty line.

In addition to their grim financial situation, the survivors are also more prone to suffer from unique physical and medical problems related to the malnutrition and severe hardships they had experienced during the war years. Dental, hearing and eyesight problems are more common among survivors as well.

Many of the survivors suffer from mental distress and loneliness, and lack proper social and family support networks. Some 50,000 to 60,000 survivors are in need of some level of nursing, as 73 percent of this population is over the age of 76, and about a fifth is over 86.

Then just yesterday, Ynet reported that Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog has finally had the grace to admit, while commemorating the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah, ‘I felt deeply ashamed, the situation we're faced with in terms of the conditions Holocaust survivors are living in is completely absurd’.

Herzog was addressing the data presented to him at an emergency meeting summoned earlier that morning with representatives from the National Insurance Institute, the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Jewish Agency and officials from the prime minister's office to discuss the difficult situation faced by thousands of Holocaust survivors forced to make ends meet with minimal government stipends.

It’s a relief to know that they’re treating the matter urgently, actually meeting on it on the morning of a public holiday.

"I ask myself - how did we get to a situation where they are not entitled to anything?" said Herzog, himself descendant from a family of survivors.

Herzog demanded that the Ministry of Finance immediately transfer control of survivor's affairs to the welfare system. Over the course of the following month Herzog intends to pursue legislation that would allow for a complete reform of the State's treatment of survivor needs.

"Now that I'm involved and exposed to this material I'm naturally affected by it and I really lose sleep over it," said Herzog. "You cannot place all the blame on the government, because there is a very long history here, a process that evolved over years. There were too many organizations that thought that the responsibility of caring for the survivors should fall on a different organization."

Herzog said he fails to understand how so many survivors are deemed ineligible for reparations or government support and are forced to live on a pitiful $300 monthly stipend.

Herzog has sworn to rectify the shameful situation.

Not that anybody asked, but I reckon this is way beyond shameful. It’s a tragedy and it’s a scandal and it thoroughly undermines the cynical claims that Israel has always made to exist for the benefit of Jews. To leave these traumatised people who have suffered more than anyone can reasonably be expected to bear to live in poverty for sixty years and more for the sake of stupid bureaucratic fuckups!

"I don't want to make empty promises, but I intend to present a program that will deal with every necessary aspect of this problem. We need to move towards legislation that will merge all the bodies handling the needs of survivors so that the sole address with be the welfare ministry," he said.

Yes, by all means, a program must be presented, legislation needs to be moved towards, and with luck by the time it’s all sorted out, maybe one or two of them will still be alive to benefit from the Jewish State’s munificence.

Don't quit your job

In about two months the new Company for Locating and Retrieving Assets of People Who Were Killed in the Holocaust Ltd. will start publishing the names Holocaust victims who had owned land, accounts or shares, and artwork or Judaica in what is now Israel.

Larry Derfner writes in Thursday’s Jerusalem Post that

The Company's self-stated goal is to seek justice for the heirs of Jews killed in the Holocaust whose property was absorbed into Israeli bodies some 60 years ago. And its challenge is to achieve it in the shortest time possible.

[Chairman Avraham] Roet estimates their total value as "at least $500 million, but we think it's more than $1 billion." He explains that even if an original bank deposit was only a few British pounds, the heirs are entitled not only to the principal but to 70 or more years of interest as well.

A deposit of $1 at an annual interest rate of 5%, compounded monthly, would be worth about $32.75 after 70 years.

As for the property, Roet explains: "Let's say somebody bought five dunams [1.25 acre/0.5 hectares] of sand dunes in 1931. How much could it have cost then? But five dunams in what has since become, say, Ramat Aviv, is worth a great deal today."

But it might be too soon to quit your job if one of your ancestors invested in Palestine and then died in the Shoah.

Once the names start being published and the heirs presumably begin coming forward, the procedure for finding out who the owners were, what they owned and who is entitled to inherit it stands to be drawn out and extraordinarily complex.

Although Roet only expects to be able to locate about 30% of the heirs, there is a formula for disrtributing unclaimed amounts,

10% will go, by law, to Holocaust education and memorialization, 15% into a reserve fund and 75% to impoverished Holocaust survivors living here, who number, by conservative estimates, 70,000. This could mean hundreds of millions of badly-needed dollars for these people's food, health care and other basic needs. They are old, mainly in their 80s, and time is running out for them.

According to Wikipedia, (source ‘"40% of Holocaust survivors in Israel live below poverty line", Haaretz, December 29, 2005’)

As of 2005, of the nearly 400,000 Holocaust survivors residing in Israel, 40% live below the poverty line, increasing significantly since 1999 and resulting in heated and dramatic protests on the part of survivors against the Israeli government and related agencies. The average rate of cancer among survivors is nearly two and a half times that of the national average. The average cases of colon cancer among survivors are nine times higher than the national average, which is attributed to the conditions of starvation experienced by survivors as well as extreme stress.

If there are only 70,000 impoverished Holocaust survivors living in Israel today, compared to 160,000 in December 2005, presumably in the fifteen or sixteen months since the Ha’aretz report, some 90,000 of those impoverished survivors have succumbed colon cancer and old age. That the Jewish state, that claims to have been established precisely because of anti-Semitism, that has made and insists on continuing to make so much political capital out of the Holocaust can’t even look after these traumatised people in their old age, that it has made them wait nearly 60 years for their entitlements, and the waiting isn’t over yet, is an irony that continues to startle me.

Not that I’m among those who expect any kind of altruism from the Jewish state. Nor is it just the octogenarian Holocaust survivors who are getting the short end of the stick. I’ve already written about the 35% of Jewish children in Israel who are claimed to go to be hungry every night. Now, I learn that ‘close to 50,000’ Jewish women a year have abortions because they can’t afford to raise a child. There’s a charity (yes, another one), Efrat, that bribes pregnant women with a basket of baby clothing, food and accessories to the tune of US$1000 to bring their foetuses to term. The Efrat website doesn’t go into details about the fate of those women and children when the baby stuff runs out after the first year. To put in into context, that means that nearly 2% of all Jewish women in Israel have abortions in any given year, roughly half as many as give birth to live children.

Anyway,

By law, though, the unclaimed assets cannot be transferred to needy survivors right away, because they are privately owned and must be set aside for the heirs for at least a certain amount of time. Asked how long it might be before those 70,000 economically-strapped Holocaust survivors might see that money, Roet says it's impossible to tell at such an early stage.

He is very critical of the government, the financial institutions, the Zionist organizations and every other establishment organ for their response to demands for restitution made in recent years by descendants of the Holocaust martyrs.

"Mainly, I blame Israel for never taking the initiative to determine the ownership of these assets," he says. "Since 2000 [when the Knesset began its inquiry into Holocaust-era bank accounts], the State of Israel has known that there are properties in its hands belonging to the heirs of Jews killed in the Holocaust, yet it has never done serious research into it."

In a further irony,

The law that emerged from the Knesset inquiry…requires the state to fund the Company's work with NIS 24 million, but requires the Company to pay that money back…"The European governments - Germany, Austria, Norway and so on - all financed the restitution efforts in their countries," he notes. "The Israeli government isn't paying a penny for the cost of our work."

It is now seven years since the Knesset inquiry into Israel's Holocaust-era assets began. There have been very, very few Holocaust survivors or heirs who've received restitution… after 60 years of neglect by the State of Israel, we can see a slender flicker of light at the end of the long tunnel toward reparations.

And some of the great grandchildren of those Holocaust victims may someday see some benefit from their slaughtered ancestors’ investments. But I’m not optimistic about the survivors in Israel living long enough to collect.

US$2.9 billion only goes so far

Anticipating US president Bush’s final budget in February 2008, former Israeli Ambassador to the US has recommended that Israel request a half billion dollar increase in military aid from the US, which now stands at about US$2.4 billion. Ayalon’s rationale,

“Why this figure? Because a request for $2.9 billion will be more acceptable than a request for $3 billion. In supermarkets, you see that prices are rounded downwards, from $10 to $9.99, and that was the logic guiding me.”

In 1998, the US and Israel struck an agreement to gradually increase military aid from $1.8 to $2.4 billion over a ten year period while simultaneously reducing non military aid from $1.2 billion to nothing. According to a June 2006 AIPAC briefing, ‘Making the Case for Aid to Israel’,

Since 1998, Israel’s bold aid initiative has saved the United States $1.80 billion dollars. At the end of the reduction period, Israel’s overall aid will be reduced from $3 billion dollars to $2.4 billion. That is a net savings for the United States of $600 million each year.

In AIPAC’s view,

U.S. aid to Israel is a cost-effective tool of U.S. foreign policy that enhances American national security interests by strengthening our only democratic ally in an unstable and vital region of the world. Israel stands shoulder to shoulder with the United States in countering the most dangerous threats the U.S. faces in the region including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by rogue regimes. Israel and the United States also share the strongest resolve in working together to fight the global war on terror.

So that would explain the ten year plan to increase military aid, as well as the new proposal for a further increase.

It turns out that since 1974, this military aid to Israel has not been in the form of ‘grants’, but, if you can tell the difference, ‘Loans with Repayment Waived’. According to a Congressional briefing on the matter, it seems

Israel preferred that the aid be in the form of loans, rather than grants, to avoid having a U.S. military contingent in Israel to oversee a grant program. Since 1974, some or all of U.S. military aid to Israel has been in the form of loans for which repayment is waived…From FY1974 through FY2003, Israel has received more than $45 billion in waived loans.

But what about the ‘economic’ aid? The 2007 request was for $120 million and next year is the year it should vanish altogether.

According to the charity Lev laLev (Heart to Heart)

At the Rubin-Zeffern Children’s Home, the girls… are furnished with clothing, medical and dental care, enrichment courses, tutoring and field trips...Some girls are true orphans while others are "living orphans", those whose parents, at best, are unable to care for them and at worse, abuse them…Many of our services are beyond what Israel's Department of Welfare subsidizes… And like our own daughters, this does not stop at the age 18, despite the suspension of Israel's Department of Welfare subsidies at that age. [my emphasis]

That’s why

We invite you to join us in this important work. There are many sponsorships opportunities for individual girls as well as donations to the orphanage in general.

But it’s not just abuse that Jewish children face in the Jewish state. In December, the Israeli National Council for the Child released its annual report.

According to the 540-page report, one-third of Israel's children (826,000) lived below the poverty line in 2005…"For many children in Israel, life is really, really bad and nothing is done to help them," said council director Dr. Yitzhak Kadman in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. "It has not always been like that. Twenty years ago, for example, only eight percent of the child population lived under the poverty line; today that figure is 33%."

The Meals4Israel site reports that according to a report compiled by Dr. Momi Dahan of The Israel Democracy Institute on behalf of the Caesarea Forum

Israel tops the list of Western countries in terms of the number of poor families, followed by the United States (17 percent), Spain (14.3 percent), Italy (12.7 percent), England (12.4 percent), Germany (8.3 percent), Belgium (8 percent), Austria (7.7 percent ), Holland (7.3 percent), Sweden (6.5 percent), Luxemburg (6 percent), and Finland (5.4 percent).

Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, Colel Chabad, Meir Panim, Jerusalem Open House, are just some of the other charities soliciting donations to feed hungry Israeli Jews.

The country established for the benefit of Jews, it turns out, is ‘a cost-effective tool of U.S. foreign policy that enhances American national security interests’, to the exclusion of the welfare of Jewish children, who just might have benefited from the non military aid that Israel and AIPAC were so keen to relinquish in favour of more cluster bombs and D-9 bulldozers.