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The post David Lammy: Washington’s Man in Labour appeared first on Global Research.

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Lebanon-based terrorists threaten violent response to Flag March scheduled for Thursday if parade route includes Muslim neighborhood.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Terror groups based in Lebanon said that they were gearing up for a violent response to the Jerusalem Day flag march scheduled for Thursday, despite the fragile ceasefire between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Israel.

Speaking to the Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Akhbar newspaper, a senior terrorist said that multiple terror groups were coordinating regarding retaliatory measures – presumably firing rockets at Israeli civilian communities – ahead of the march in Jerusalem.

“The issue of the Flag March was not included in the ceasefire agreement, and the resistance has not taken its eye off the city at the moment and is ready to deal with any development or provocation by the occupation government,” the terrorist told the outlet.

The march could serve as a “grenade that may blow up the situation in all the Palestinian territories,” he warned.

Developments at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount are also being watched closely, he added. Any change to the status quo, such as allowing Jews freedom to pray at the site, could lead to a “campaign that will be bigger, more extensive and not limited to the Gaza Strip.”

Each year, Israelis parade through the streets of Jerusalem, including the Muslim Quarter in the Old City, while waving Israeli flags as part of a public holiday commemorating the reunification of the capital city in 1967.

Pro-Palestinian activists and Arab-Israeli Palestinians have framed the presence of the country’s national flags in the Muslim neighborhood as a provocation, and recent years have seen clashes between Arabs and Jews during the event.

In May 2021, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caved to threats from terror groups and rerouted the march to avoid Muslim areas. Despite the concession, Hamas launched a rocket at Jerusalem during the celebrations, setting off the Operation Guardian of the Walls clash.

Less than 24 hours after the current ceasefire between Islamic Jihad and Israel, several rockets were launched towards Asheklon and other communities in southern Israel. Gaza terror groups claimed that the launch was the result of a “technical malfunction,” but Israel swiftly retaliated by bombing Hamas assets in the Strip.

The post Jerusalem Flag march is ‘grenade that could blow up region,’ terror groups warn appeared first on World Israel News.

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The post “Israel Is Built on the Ruins of Hundreds of Palestinian Villages” appeared first on Global Research.

Mayors outraged over Finance Ministry proposal to seize property taxes and redistribute funds to poorer and peripheral cities.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Municipalities across Israel announced a general strike on Monday in response to an ongoing dispute with the Finance Ministry, with many of the largest cities in the country participating.

The cities of Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Rishon LeTzion were among the municipalities that shuttered their public daycare centers, schools, and libraries, stopped garbage collection, and said they would not allow the public to receive services inside their city halls.

The dramatic closures come after the failure of negotiations between the Finance Ministry and municipalities over a controversial new tax distribution measure.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich created a new policy after taking office, which would see his ministry seize property taxes collected by municipalities and transfer them into a national fund. Those funds would be redistributed to peripheral and poorer cities in Israel as part of an incentive to encourage the construction of new housing in those areas.

The mayors of many cities and towns in Israel have opposed the plan, as they argue that the property taxes collected by residents of their communities should not be used to benefit other municipalities.

Smotrich released a statement on Monday morning indicating that he would not back down from the new policy, despite the widespread municipal strikes. He also stressed that he believes that local authorities have too much power regarding how tax funds are distributed.

“We will not give in to threats and blackmail and will act professionally for the benefit of the State of Israel and the citizens of Israel,” Smotrich said in a media conference.

“We must not surrender to extortion. We are on the way to major struggles against huge market forces that concentrate in their hands a tremendous power that we are going to take from them – [our goal] is to break up centralization and monopolies,” he said.

Haim Bibas, mayor of the city of Modiin and head of the Federation of Local Authorities in Israel, responded angrily to Smotrich’s statement.

“The only one trying to extort public money is the Finance Ministry,” he told Hebrew-language media.

“This is money intended for residents for education, welfare and infrastructure” in the cities from which the tax funds were collected, he added.

Despite the fact that Bibas and a number of other mayors participating in the strike are members of the Likud party, a coalition politician accused those opposed to the measure as coming from a left-wing political perspective.

Interior and Health Minister Moshe Arbel (Shas) told Radio Kol BeRama that “the decision of several councils to strike today is a political decision against the government.”

Arbel framed the seizing of funds for redistribution in other municipalities as a Robin Hood-type measure, saying that “we will take from the strong and give it to the weak.”

The post No schools, garbage collection: Cities on strike across Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

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The post Biden Family ‘Got $1 Million From Romania’ While Joe Vowed to Clean Up Corruption: GOP ‘Influence-peddling’ Probe Into $10M in Foreign Cash Reveals Hunter Set Up 15 Companies After His Dad Became VP and Lay Out How Money Came from China appeared first on Global Research.

Reinhold Niebuhr had a brilliant way of criticizing unrealistic extremes.  He once wrote: 

“The French Revolution proclaimed ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ a little too blithely.  For liberty and equality are just as much in contradiction as they are complementary to each other.  A society can destroy liberty in its search for equality; it can annul the spirit of equal justice by a too consistent devotion to liberty.”  

June Bingham, Courage to Change. (New York and Canada: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961), 300.

That wisdom consolidates a lot of punch against the extremes of Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism.  Economically, we should have an economy that is free and fair, not fixed as in Socialism.  From a Christian viewpoint, however, there are real concerns about economic fairness and justice. Yet, even after decades of pondering these issues, I still have lingering questions.

First, let me wind back time to offer an illustrative point.  My first job back in the late 1980s was selling concessions at a movie theater.  I am all about fairness and justness, but it would be absurd to argue that my first job should have commanded a living wage.  Yes, there is a real need for jobs that enable human flourishing, but I cannot imagine that the simple skills of a high school student could have gotten me through life.  Most of us, reflecting on the jobs we once held, realize that those were jobs we cannot imagine keeping forever.  They are transitional, stepping-stone jobs, as we get from one place to another.  Adam Smith also shared a real concern, however, that there should be living wage jobs.  In Wealth of Nations, he wrote: 

“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him.  They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise, it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, edited Edwin Cannan (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976), Volume I, 76-77.

Furthermore, he added:  

“Thus far at least seems certain, that in order to bring up a family, the labor of the husband and wife together must, even in the lowest species of common labor, be able to earn something more than what is precisely necessary for their own maintenance; but in what proportion, whether in the above-mentioned, or in any other, I shall not take upon me to determine.” 

Ibid.

Smith is right, but when I first read the last line, I thought it seemed like the great copout.  Then, as I reflected on my own job experience, I realized what a hard question Smith was trying to answer.  We do need an economy that is both free and fair, and we do need living wage jobs for all hardworking adults.  But that every such job generated by a free market should command a living wage, is one I still wrestle with.  A sound economy should generate enough living wage jobs for its workers to seem fair.  Is the “invisible hand” of the market, which Smith only briefly referred to, sufficient to provide this?  In Smith’s view, the overall skill and pay of any growing free economy should steadily rise. 

Thinking over Niebuhr’s quote tells us clearly why we should choose a free market over a Marxist one.  It is indeed true that too consistent a devotion to equality will destroy any freedom in an economy, any incentive to rise above the lowest skilled job.  On the opposite extreme, an economy left completely to its own devices would be vulnerable to the twin powers of sinfulness (in this case greed) and power.  Successful businesses, run by greedy businessmen, would quash competition, and grind their labor force mercilessly into the ground.  It was done in Marx’s day, and much before him Adam Smith told us to be wary of the “narrow view” merchants, who lobbied only for their self-interest, and against public welfare.  Though Smith advocated for freedom, he understood something about selfish human nature too.  We forget that Smith was first a moral theorist, having written the Theory of Moral Sentiments long before he wrote The Wealth of Nations.  

Of course, our capitalist market has never really been completely laissez-faire, nor should it be.  A fixed, state-run economy, however, tries to do what should never be done:  make government do the same job of business instead of regulating its behavior.  The first mistake here is an obvious conflict of interest, and an abusive consolidation of powers:  productive and regulatory.  In the second place, it fails to appreciate the necessary mental differences of businessmen and politicians:  the one to make profit, the other to govern and enforce laws.

Certainly, I agree with Niebuhr and share his Christian concerns about a free market.  Free markets are just that – free – and we cannot expect perfect freedom to produce perfect fairness.  As a young minister, Niebuhr wrote Notebook of a Tamed Cynic revealing his concern: 

“According to the ethics of our modern industrialism men over fifty, without special training, are so much junk.”  He added further “A city which is built around a productive process, and which give only casual thought and incidental attention to its human problems is really a kind of hell.  Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the rest of us eat, drink, and make merry.  What a civilization!”  

Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 1957), 115.

Niebuhr first demonstrated the compassion of a Christian and later acquired the realist wisdom that the Marxist solution to this Christian concern was ultimately wrong.

And what is our solution?  A free market will never be a completely fair market, and that is a compromise with which we must be willing to accept in order to avoid the Marxist error.  Free markets allow selfish and powerful individuals to accrue more power than they already have, while workers at a disadvantage may fall behind.  Without a doubt we must pay close attention to the fairness and equity of the market, we must never turn a blind eye to it.  Yet we must always be cognizant that overextended governmental power is very likely to be as dangerous as too wide a latitude for the power of free business.  Balance of economic power against political power seems to be the key, just as we weigh the scales of liberty and equality.  We need both.  If we were to be robbed of either, wouldn’t we want the other?  If I have no freedom, I will crave it.  If I have no feeling of relative equality with fellow citizens, I shall desire that also.  Balancing the scales of liberty and equality is not just a free-market concern, but a Christian and human one too.

The post The Best Economy: Free and Fair, But Not Fixed. appeared first on Providence.

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