Tags: Tim Wise
Tags: Tim Wise
Tags: Tim Wise
Tags: Tim Wise
Tags: Tim Wise
Q: Why don’t blondes eat pickles?
A: Because they get their heads stuck in the jar!
- the Indian Point Joke Book
Tags: deception, magnificent, Valleyview
By Jonathan Cook
Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have revealed.
If you work for Zionists, expect to be robbed
A new report, “State Robbery,” to be published later this month, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers.
According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers’ pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories — a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the settlements.
Nearly 50,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are working in Israel — following the easing of restrictions on entering Israel under the “economic peace” promised by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister — and continue to have such contributions docked from their pay.
Complicit in the deception, the report adds, is the Histadrut, the Israeli labour federation, which levies a monthly fee on Palestinian workers, even though they are not entitled to membership and are not represented in labour disputes.
“This is a clear-cut case of theft from Palestinian workers on a grand scale,” said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist and one of the authors of the report. “There are no reasons for Israel to delay in returning this money either to the workers or to their beneficiaries.”
The deductions started being made in 1970, three years after the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began, when Palestinian workers started to enter Israel in significant numbers, most of them employed as manual laborers in the agriculture and construction industries.
Typically, the workers lose a fifth of their salary in deductions that are supposed to cover old age payments, unemployment allowance, disability insurance, child benefits, trade union fees, pension fund, holiday and sick pay, and health insurance. In practice, however, the workers are entitled only to disability payments in case of work accidents and are insured against loss of work if their employer goes bankrupt.
According to the report, compiled by two human rights groups, the Alternative Information Centre and Kav La’Oved, only a fraction of the total contributions — less than eight percent — was used to award benefits to Palestinian workers. The rest was secretly transferred to the finance ministry.
The Israeli organizations assess that the workers were defrauded of at least $2.25 billion in today’s prices, in what they describe as a minimum and “very conservative” estimate of the misappropriation of the funds. Such a sum represents about 10 percent of the PA’s annual budget.
The authors also note that they excluded from their calculations two substantial groups of Palestinian workers — those employed in the Jewish settlements and those working in Israel’s black economy — because figures were too hard to obtain.
Hever said the question of whether the bulk of the deductions — those for national insurance — had been illegally taken from the workers was settled by the Israeli High Court back in 1991. The judges accepted a petition from the flower growers’ union that the government should return about $1.5 million in contributions from Palestinian workers in the industry.
“The legal precedent was set then and could be used to reclaim the rest of these excessive deductions,” he said.
At the height of Palestinian participation in the Israeli labour force, in the early 1990s, as many as one in three Palestinian workers was dependent on an Israeli employer.
Israel continued requiring contributions from Palestinian workers after the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, arguing that it needed to make the deductions to ensure Israeli workers remained competitive.
However, the report notes that such practices were supposed to have been curbed by the Oslo process. Israel agreed to levy an “equalization tax” — equivalent to the excessive contributions paid by Palestinians — a third of which would be invested in a fund that would later be available to the workers.
In fact, however, the Israeli State Comptroller, a government watchdog official, reported in 2003 that only about a tenth of the money levied on the workers had actually been placed in the fund.
The finance ministry has admitted that most of the money taken from the workers was passed to Israeli military authorities in the Palestinian territories to pay for “infrastructure programs.” Hannah Zohar, the director of Kav La’Oved who co-authored the report, said she believed that the ministry was actually referring to the construction of illegal settlements.
The report is also highly critical of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation, which it accuses of grabbing “a piece of the pie” by forcing Palestinian workers to pay a monthly “organizing fee” to the union since 1970, even though Palestinians are not entitled to membership.
Despite the Histadrut’s agreement with its Palestinian counterpart in 2008 to repay the fees, only 20 percent was returned, leaving $30 million unaccounted for.
The Histadrut was also implicated in another “rip-off,” said Hever. It agreed in 1990 to the Israeli construction industry’s demand that Palestinian workers pay an extra two percent tax to promote the training of recent Jewish immigrants, most of them from the former Soviet Union.
Hever said that in effect the Palestinian laborers were required to “subsidize the training of workers meant to replace them.” The funds were never used for the stated purpose but were mainly issued as grants to the families of Israeli workers.
In one especially cynical use of the funds, the report notes, the money was spent on portable stoves for soldiers involved in Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza last year.
In response, the finance ministry called the report “incorrect and misleading,” and the Histadrut claimed it was “full of lies.” However, neither provided rebuttals of the report’s allegations or its calculations.
Hever said the government body responsible for making the deductions, the department of payments, had initially refused to divulge any of its figures, but had partly relented after some statistics were made available through leaks from its staff.
Assef Saeed, a senior official in the Palestinian Authority’s labour ministry, said the PA was keen to discuss the issue of the deductions, but that talks were difficult because of the lack of contacts between the two sides.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
By Thom Jefferson
Take two tablets and call me in the morning
If you call yourself a Christian, you are familiar with the commandment about stealing. After all, God wrote it in stone for Moses so you would remember it.
However, Christians in this country are so totally immersed in materialism; they no longer take responsibility for real world application of Biblical principles. Perhaps, one of the greatest challenges in overcoming Christian moral apathy is the fact that in America, most stealing is legal. (Read on and I will hopefully prove this to you.).
Christians have become so desensitized by the culture of Baal; if something is legal they automatically assume it is also moral. Nothing could be further from the truth. Is abortion moral? Is the “legal” act of bombing innocent civilians (particularly women and children) moral?
I urge you to stop reading your bible and listening to your clergyman long enough to learn some basic common law and decide for yourself whether true Christians can possibly condone what the social manipulators peddle as acceptable American morality.*
Communism vs. Socialism
Most Americans are not comfortable with Communism, but for some reason they embrace and devour Socialism. The fact of the matter is…they are identical. Both ideologies embrace collectivism which eschews private ownership in favor of group ownership. The only discernible difference between the two is the means at which you arrive there. The Fabian Socialists arrive at their goal, (as they have in the United States), by seducing the public into agreement. The Communists, on the other hand, implement their politics “With the barrel of a gun” as Chairman Mao observed.
Nevertheless, I repeat…the end result of both is identical. Yet citizens of western countries live under and support Socialism but will go to war and kill people that use the “C” word for an identical collectivist system. Go figure.
This is just a benefit, right?
Christians need to realize that supporting any political system which eliminates private property to give it to others, whether you call it fascism, socialism or communism; is in fact supporting theft! Once you take the time to think it over, it’s pretty cut and dry.
Is not theft the very antithesis of Christianity? If that is the case then Christians who support and enable theft vicariously through their vote, by electing political thugs who issue promises to steal for them are, in fact, breaking God’s commandments.
Take a hard look at the political platform of the Democrat and Republican parties for the past fifty years. Do you see what I see, friend? BOTH party platforms openly endorse and actively support all ten planks of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto! This is seriously at odds with God’s commandment against stealing.
Once you lift up the hood and take a good look…liberalism, fascism, socialism, communism, democrat, and republican ideologies are basically indistinguishable collectivist ideologies. Judge them by their actions and not their words. My point to you is that if you have in the past fifty years supported either a Democrat or a Republican don’t be surprised when you have a little bit of explaining to do with your maker on judgment day.
Let’s take a look at some of the specific things that Christians often support but would not if they gave any credence to what they read about in their bibles.
Plank 5 of the Communist manifesto: National Banks
This is the granddaddy of them all. Those of you that support the income tax, support the enslavement of your neighbors for three months a year to pay extortion money to a private group of Jewish bankers known as the Federal Reserve.
On a scale of one to ten: stealing three months of your neighbor’s life rates pretty high up there. Ask yourself…at what point does such a scheme become chattel slavery? If you’re undereducated on this topic I suggest you read “The Creature from Jekyll Island.” If you don’t read at all, (like many Americans), at least Google “GCN radio” and start listening to some of the Internet radio shows there.
Plank 10 of the Communist manifesto: Government Schools
The ideal student
Perhaps your neighbor home schools, or perhaps he has no children at all. Yet you support political parties that demand, upon threat of violence, that he pays a “property tax” to subsidize the education of everyone else’s children. Only a delusional Christian could see this as anything other than stealing. Perhaps because this theft is legal and your 501.c3 Church does not speak out about it, you think that this theft is OK with God. Do you?
Borrowing money from a fractional reserve bank
Anytime you borrow money under our currently criminal banking system (including the use of credit cards), you are causing the creation, or more precisely the counterfeiting, of money. If you know anything about economics this is called inflation.
When YOU cause inflation, you’re stealing from your neighbor. This is not a trivial matter. Think about the retired couple down the street that has a $100,000 nest egg. After 20 years of 6% inflation this nest egg is worth only about $25,000. You have thus stolen $75,000 from this couple. Inflation currently is running well over 12%.
If you want to follow Gods commandment here, I suggest you stop supporting parties that allow lawless banking practices. Or do you believe that current banking practices are moral because they’re legal and your Church does not speak out about such matters?
Supporting building codes and zoning
I have a gut feeling that banks are the special interest group enforcing building codes because they are one of the primary beneficiaries of these draconian laws.
A major effect of building codes is to ensure that people must borrow money from a bank in order to buy a home. If the average home costs $100,000 then at 6% interest over 30 years, banks make $200,000 on each and every one of these loans. Do you think that forcing your neighbor to pay “the money changers” $200,000 is not stealing? Again, only a delusional Christian would think so.
EPA regulations
The Constitution states that Congress shall make all laws, yet you support and tolerate bureaucratic alphabet agencies such as the EPA that manufacture law at whim. I was personally the victim of one such “whim” of the EPA. I lived on a piece of land that needed a bridge over a small creek to be able to drive onto the property. The EPA dictated to me that I come up with over 10 times more money than I paid for this property before even constructing this bridge. Need I add, money that I did not have, in order to meet their arbitrary regulations. As a result I became homeless and was forced to sell what became worthless land.
I ask you, does your political party support the non-constitutional EPA? If you party is not against them then it must be for them, right? Are you still convinced that because these policies are legal and your Church stands mute everything is OK?
If you support either of the two major parties I submit to you that you were at least partially responsible for stealing my home, and you certainly don’t want to know about all of the resulting costs to society over the next twenty years that this theft will have caused.
What should a Christian to do?
First of all, you can begin to do your own thinking for a change. Research some basic concepts such as liberty. Go beyond what you’ve been programmed to think. Knowledge is power, which is exactly what the powers that be do not want you to have (if you haven’t noticed already). After you educate yourself you will, no doubt, begin to realize with 20/20 vision how dysfunctional the above systems are.
Unfortunately, because the Government steals at the very least 50% of what even the poorest of us makes, you may for the time being, have to depend upon some immoral socialist program that is funded by stealing from your neighbor.
I think this is excusable as long as you realize that you must unceasingly support and work towards the eradication of all of these injustices. You may rationalize your participation in something like say food stamps because it is not stealing in light of the 50% of your income that government has taken from you beforehand. You are out of necessity just getting back from the thief a small portion of what he has already stolen from you.
Admittedly this is a slippery slope that I wish we did not have to journey upon. But one must survive. Meanwhile, share what you’re learning with others. Like the Bible says, sow seeds. And if you come across good ground, those seeds will take root. Likewise…cast not your pearls before swine. Better yet, do not congregate with the (American) idol worshipers and (internet pornographic) fornicators.
But most importantly, be ye a doer of the word. Remember, despite what the propagandists attempt to drum into your brain, this is a Christian nation. For truly, there is no freedom without God. He created all that is and evermore will be.
The rest is up to you.
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* Could the reason be that Churches do not do their job of educating their flocks be that they have a huge conflict of interest by becoming a 501.c3 non-profits? Ask your clergyman about Presidents Johnson’s executive order prohibiting non-profits from political speech.
Tags: Christians, Communism, morals, Socialism