Yesterday I spent the evening in the theater, watching "All my sons" again (in Hebrew). The first time that I watched this play was in the age of 19, I have tagged this play as the best theater play I have ever seen and the actors who played there as the best actors I have seen on stage. These two assertions have not changed over the years, it is still the best play I've ever seen, and the actors who played first time I saw it are indeed the best actors I've seen on stage. The actors played yesterday are good, but not in the same league of the two giant actors from the past.
"All my sons" is now in Israel plays to the popular sentiment. It talks about taking the greed, and making the "business' and profits in the center of the universe. In this play it takes it to extreme. shipping damaged airplane parts to "save the business" and causing many people to die is considered as extreme behavior, but the principle of putting profit in the center, is one of the cornerstones of the western culture. Israel is now experiencing mass demonstrations with the slogan "the people demand social justice". In Saturday night there was the biggest demonstration that the country has experienced. This wave challenges the western culture thinking, talking about "swinish capitalism", where cost of living for much of the population is too high since a relatively small group of people who are very rich, control most of the branches of the Israeli economy, with monopolies or oligopolies, and keep the cost high.
Maybe in a social utopia, big corporations would say: "we earn a lot of money, we can give up some profit in order to raise the standard of life for the common people, either by offering some cheap products if they are in the retail business, or sell directly to common people, or if they sell to such businesses, do it indirectly, by reducing price and in return ask them to reduce prices of some products to the end consumer, or if the customer is a government, use the reduction to offer more social services",
Of course, social utopia has nothing to do with reality, the companies work in the real world of Wall Street analysts, executive bonuses linked to accounting metrics, and stock prices. I wonder how many companies that would face the Joe Keller's dilemma from "All my sons" -- do something morally wrong, or risk losing the business, would resist the temptation. No wonder that Arthur Miller's play was accepted in unease in the USA in the 1940-ies, and earned him the title of communist. But I think it is good as a food for thought.
This is typically a professional Blog, with some off-topic deviations; this posting is one of them.
Nowadays nobody that lives in Israel can ignore the phenomenon of the last couple of weeks: mass protest in term of people demonstrating by living in tents in various places, mainly central Tel-Aviv, and the demonstrations all over the country last night (see picture above from the Tel-Aviv demonstration). What is the demonstration about? -- it started as protest about the cost of housing both purchase price and rental price, and accumulated other reasons for protest - talking generally on "social justice". In Israel the political focus as well as the major voting pattern is determined according to the war-and-peace decisions. Thus there is some abuse of the terms "right" and "left" in the Israeli politics, where (in gross generalization) typically "left" is referred as those who believe that Israel should take active steps towards peace, and support the establishment of Palestinian state, and "right" is referred as those who don't believe that peace is possible in our generation, and are against the establishment of Palestinian state. Since many of the people are frustrated from the "peace process", there are more in Israel who voted for the "right" block in that sense, and currently we have the most extreme-right coalition ruling the country ever. However the politically right administration happens also to possess social and economic right ideology, and it seems that this is the break point between the government and the people.
There are two types of socio-economic systems: the American system in which there are relatively low taxes, and relatively low social services; and the system of some of the European countries - with high taxes and high social services. It seems that gradually Israel adopts the bad aspects of both -- taxes are high (used to maintain the enormous defense expenses as well as supporting sectors that are part of the current coalition), social services are gradually decreasing. On top of it, the "free market competition" ideology that the current Prime-Minister imported from the USA in its extreme form, does not seem to work here. The reason is that the country is too small to have real competition, thus in each branch of the economy (banking, communication, food...) there are a small number of players who realize that it will be good for all to divide the market and maximize the revenues from its market share, and not really compete. The Cartel oriented market and high sales taxes in various forms results in the fact that the prices of everything in Israel are now more expensive than almost anywhere else in the universe. Those who suffer most are the young people that try now to establish themselves, and discover that even with relatively high salaries, they get to financial difficulties, this is the population that started the protest, and this is the root cause of the current protest. The required solution -- total change in the priorities and returning to the socially-based country. Is it going to happen under the most right-wing government ever? Will this become a social revolution or just phase out? we'll have to wait and see.
A footnote: the entire protest started within Facebook, which still serves as a major vehicle for coordination.
