WHO'DA THUNK YOU COULD MAKE THE DEMOCRATS AND TORIES LOOK SMART?:

Moustache Pete: Israel`s New Labor Party Commissar (Steven Plaut, 11/16/2005, Jewish Press)

The new Labor Party boss [Amir Peretz] is, to put it politely, a cross between Jimmy Hoffa and Cheech. A party hack who built his career mainly by establishing a power base in Israel's corrupt Histadrut trade union federation, Peretz got as far as he has in part through fortuitously pinning his political fortunes to the tailcoats of other politicians, and in part because the establishment politicians in Labor never took him seriously enough to neuter him politically. [...]

eretz was elected to the parliament in 1988. As a member of Knesset, he devoted most of his energies to prohibiting the use of out-sourcing and operation of non-unionized labor exchanges, the result being higher unemployment among low-skilled Israeli workers.

Seeing that his prospects for a senior position in Labor were close to nonexistent, he joined the disaffected faction set up by Haim Ramon in the early 1990's. Ramon considered himself a serious contender for the job of prime minister but was certain he was being blocked by the party machine. Ramon and his sidekick Peretz decided to challenge the Labor establishment inside the Histadrut trade union federation with their own dissident slate named “New Haim” (or “New Life,” a play on Ramon's first name).

In the Histadrut union elections, the Ramon team beat the Labor machine and seized control of the trade union federation, with Peretz as second in command and in charge of strike actions and trade union negotiations.

But already by then the Histadrut, once a powerful state within the Israeli state, had lost much of its muscle. It had been a stunning fall for the union behemoth: Histadrut membership cards were a sine qua non for getting a job in pre-1948 Israel and without such membership workers were barred from many jobs even into the 1970's.

Histadrut funds were always misused by the Labor Party to fund its own election campaigns. Before statehood, funds donated by Jews around the world had been funneled through the Histadrut into the coffers of MAPAI (forerunner to today's Labor) and used to build the party's power base. After 1948 Israeli taxpayer funds were similarly misappropriated for the same purpose.

By the early 1990's the Histadrut was little more than a weak and corrupt anachronism, stripped of its control of Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest bank, after the “bank share scandal,” a large Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 1983. It also lost control of many of its insolvent pension funds, which had long served as slush funds for Histadrut commissars, and of its captive “General Sick Fund,” Israel's largest health service provider.

After beating the Laborites in the Histadrut elections, Ramon quickly tired of his trade union toy. He resigned from the leadership of the Histadrut in 1995 and turned the job over to Amir Peretz

While Ramon made his way back into the Labor Party's upper echelons, Peretz was still seeing his political ambitions stymied by the party machine. In 1999 he decided to use his power base in the Histadrut to challenge the Labor Party and set up his own competing “labor” faction, named Am Echad (One Nation).

Using funds appropriated, Jimmy Hoffa style, from trade union accounts, Peretz spent his way into the parliament as a small two-seat (later three-seat) party, though he received just 16 percent of the vote in his home town of Sderot. His victory was, however, large enough to force Labor to co-opt Peretz and his people and offer them a power share within the prty, including reserved Knesset seats in the elections slate.

In parliament Peretz only bothered to show up for about 11 percent of the votes and was dubbed the “laziest member of Knesset.” His stock reply to critics was, “I am busy with the Histadrut.”
The single largest item on his expense account, according to a Knesset report of 2001, was NIS 18,720 for private tutoring in English, a language he has never quite mastered.

Politically, Peretz, who likes to describe himself as a “social democrat,” is associated with the Israeli Oslo Left, and was long a board member of Peace Now and the left-wing New Israel Fund. His ideas on economics are little different from those of nineteenth century socialists and syndicalists, and he dreams of turning Israel into some sort of hybrid combination of Sweden and Belarus. He has no patience for and no understanding of market economics.

As the major promoter of an ever higher minimum wage in Israel, Peretz bears a major share of responsible for the country's high unemployment rate, caused largely by that minimum wage. Peretz also led the campaign against the employment in Israel of foreign temporary workers, who today are the backbone of Israel's agricultural and construction sectors.

Had Peretz gotten his way, both those sectors would have collapsed.

While mouthing socialist slogans about the working class, Peretz actually built his power base mainly on the elitist “unions” of highly skilled, lavishly paid professionals – i.e., feather-bedded workers in government-owned or sponsored monopolies such as the Israel Electric Company, whose “workers,” including engineers and technicians, are probably the most grossly overpaid group of people in Israel. Peretz made common cause with the “workers” in this and other sectors – such as the seaports and airports – in which market competition is suppressed by the Israeli government.

Peretz consistently promoted the interests of the unionized overpaid professionals and semi-professionals at the expense of blue-collar workers – those hurt most by the frequent strikes called by the Histadrut. He single-handedly shut down Israel's airports so often that foreign businessmen were refusing to come to Israel altogether, not from a fear of terrorism but from a fear of getting stranded when the airports were shut down. [...]

While mouthing the slogans of the Left about Oslo, “disengagement” and the “peace process,” Amir Peretz clearly means to make anti-market economics and “social issues” his main banners. One should bear in mind that the Israeli Left does even more damage when it gets all compassionate and concerned about “social issues” than it does when it pursues “peace.” The way it invariably pursues “social issues” is through seeking massive tax increases and budget outlays for “social needs” coupled with massive interference in market mechanisms.

But Peretz's ambitions go well beyond even that.

There's less pressure on Israel's Labor Party to reform itself -- because the only politician on the Right who grasps the Third Way, Bibi Netanyahu, has made himself unfeasible by his opposition to ending the occupation -- but it's still pretty amazing that they managed to settle on this retrograde a figure.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 17, 2005 6:03 PM