The dominance of a firefighting mentality, which has made normal business a nightmare for the past two years, is now at an end. What of progress?
By the definition that created Israel as an industrial state, progress is the tool whereby the quality of life for all is incrementally improved through industrial planning and the investment of both the private sector and State in the development of manufacturing, construction, agricultural and service-driven enterprise, conducted through the open and active participation of the electorate and citizenry.
By today?s definition, though - tootled about less enthusiastically now than in the 1990?s by tiny trumpets in a minor key - heavy industrial enterprise will forever be superceded by an Internet-based trading in information databases, with the logistics of survival addressed by imports paid for by white-collar office boffins twiddling away at keyboards and serviced by real estate traders, interior decorators, waiters, tour guides, chefs and undocumented au pairs to watch the kiddies.
The latter sounds great on paper. Now find one, just one economy on the planet not utterly prostrate that worships this economic idol. Manufacturing and other essential industries pay for everything, just as in the last century. Where in 1929, the year manufacturing peaked in the USA as a percentage of the workforce, 28% of the nation?s employees were involved in manufacturing. Now, today, it is 24%. This does not include all the remorae on the belly of the shark: software consultancies, temporary labor providers, ad agencies, and subcontract services such as legal, accounting, and marketing.
Don?t try to sell the Net-based Tooth Fairy idol to Singapore, Ireland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries or any developing country getting ahead of the game. They will laugh you out of the room. In China, a manufacturing engineer is held in the same esteem as football stars are in the West, and rightfully so. They feed everybody.
What has this to do with Middle East peace? Everything. The USA and the EU have been popping their rivets since 1993 to formulate a Marshall Plan-style industrial program to put those in the region to work at manufacturing and export-driven production industries. Once in place, the Middle East participants in the plan will enjoy the USA and the EU as preferential marketing zones. Were Israel to pick up the ball, and work to form its own mini-EU with Turkey and Jordan (and with others, if they lay down the sword), even from solely an industrial training and apprenticeship standpoint, it stands to move to a position of prominence in this development while deploying existing idle assets.
So who pays for all this? The largest military manufacturing contract in Israel?s history, US$888 million, has been signed with Turkey to upgrade several hundred tanks in the Turkish military?s arsenal. This rather thick ?edge of the wedge? into further industrial prosperity by Israel can serve as the leading-edge tool to cover the costs of creating a new industrial class in the Middle East.
Israel?s role in all this can be huge, both as industrial investors and as peacemakers working at a profit. Were it to re-envision and re-configure all these abandoned hotels as educational facilities and dorms for North and Latin American, Turkish, Jordanian, Eastern European, Asian and Indian engineers, machinists, welders and production workers in training, as well as offering the same to other regional participants, a new industrial Haskalah ("enlightenment") could take place for all, based on proper training and preparation of the world?s workforce for the challenges of tomorrow.
Future prospects loom brightly for production-oriented opportunities which create real, not virtual, and permanent, living-wage employment and skills. Israel?s breakthroughs in offshore natural gas discovery require huge turbine-driven natural gas compressors, steel pipe, large valves, control systems, distribution systems for the market place, storage tanks of immense proportion, and ships to carry liquified natural gas to its future offshore customer base. There is no no Israel turbine compressor packager or fab shop, there is no shipyard presently equipped to build so large a ship as an LNG carrier, there is now no facility presently chartered to make the large diameter steel pipe needed for natural gas transport in Israel, nor is there the large number of Israeli experts and engineers to put such pipeline projects together.
Other opportunities? Israel soon, I believe, will ratify the Kyoto Protocol and thereafter invest heavily in green power generation options as well as expanding its present conventional power generating capabilities by 30% in the next 5 years. A mandate therefore will be created for the purchase of automotive and industrial emissions controls systems nationwide, to be paid for by the financial and engineering instrument of emissions trading. There is presently not one low-emissions muffler manufacturer in Israel, not one stack gas pollution control manufacturer in Israel, nor a single powerplant manufacturer for the generation of clean power.
Israel?s economy was built up from nothing by machinists, engineers, farmers, welders, aviation techs, and workers in heavy steel. It is wrong to shelve such activities as obsolete when all the evidence points to the contrary, and even more of an evil when one looks at the unemployment figures. What present industrial planning bespeaks is that no one in government is asking the Israel industrial trade associations what Israel needs to continue to grow and prosper, but instead seek only the advice of professional economists, bankers, and piratical entrepreneurs with no desire for a better life for all Israelis, but only for the bottom line.
Israel has but two options from which to choose respecting the growing number of poor regionally and domestically: provide them with the means to feed themselves through industrial development, or to plan on eventually having to kill or incarcerate them all. Today?s youth of both Israel and America needs to go study the posters of Jewish pioneers waving a banner in one hand, and clutching a monkey wrench or welding torch or scythe in the other. That generation was a lot smarter than today?s. Respect for one?s elders? achievements isn?t just a strategy for being nice, and being remembered in the will. It is a strategy and model for national survival.
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Walter James O?Brien writes from Everett, Washington.
Copyright 2002 Walter James O?Brien
By the definition that created Israel as an industrial state, progress is the tool whereby the quality of life for all is incrementally improved through industrial planning and the investment of both the private sector and State in the development of manufacturing, construction, agricultural and service-driven enterprise, conducted through the open and active participation of the electorate and citizenry.
By today?s definition, though - tootled about less enthusiastically now than in the 1990?s by tiny trumpets in a minor key - heavy industrial enterprise will forever be superceded by an Internet-based trading in information databases, with the logistics of survival addressed by imports paid for by white-collar office boffins twiddling away at keyboards and serviced by real estate traders, interior decorators, waiters, tour guides, chefs and undocumented au pairs to watch the kiddies.
The latter sounds great on paper. Now find one, just one economy on the planet not utterly prostrate that worships this economic idol. Manufacturing and other essential industries pay for everything, just as in the last century. Where in 1929, the year manufacturing peaked in the USA as a percentage of the workforce, 28% of the nation?s employees were involved in manufacturing. Now, today, it is 24%. This does not include all the remorae on the belly of the shark: software consultancies, temporary labor providers, ad agencies, and subcontract services such as legal, accounting, and marketing.
Don?t try to sell the Net-based Tooth Fairy idol to Singapore, Ireland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries or any developing country getting ahead of the game. They will laugh you out of the room. In China, a manufacturing engineer is held in the same esteem as football stars are in the West, and rightfully so. They feed everybody.
What has this to do with Middle East peace? Everything. The USA and the EU have been popping their rivets since 1993 to formulate a Marshall Plan-style industrial program to put those in the region to work at manufacturing and export-driven production industries. Once in place, the Middle East participants in the plan will enjoy the USA and the EU as preferential marketing zones. Were Israel to pick up the ball, and work to form its own mini-EU with Turkey and Jordan (and with others, if they lay down the sword), even from solely an industrial training and apprenticeship standpoint, it stands to move to a position of prominence in this development while deploying existing idle assets.
So who pays for all this? The largest military manufacturing contract in Israel?s history, US$888 million, has been signed with Turkey to upgrade several hundred tanks in the Turkish military?s arsenal. This rather thick ?edge of the wedge? into further industrial prosperity by Israel can serve as the leading-edge tool to cover the costs of creating a new industrial class in the Middle East.
Israel?s role in all this can be huge, both as industrial investors and as peacemakers working at a profit. Were it to re-envision and re-configure all these abandoned hotels as educational facilities and dorms for North and Latin American, Turkish, Jordanian, Eastern European, Asian and Indian engineers, machinists, welders and production workers in training, as well as offering the same to other regional participants, a new industrial Haskalah ("enlightenment") could take place for all, based on proper training and preparation of the world?s workforce for the challenges of tomorrow.
Future prospects loom brightly for production-oriented opportunities which create real, not virtual, and permanent, living-wage employment and skills. Israel?s breakthroughs in offshore natural gas discovery require huge turbine-driven natural gas compressors, steel pipe, large valves, control systems, distribution systems for the market place, storage tanks of immense proportion, and ships to carry liquified natural gas to its future offshore customer base. There is no no Israel turbine compressor packager or fab shop, there is no shipyard presently equipped to build so large a ship as an LNG carrier, there is now no facility presently chartered to make the large diameter steel pipe needed for natural gas transport in Israel, nor is there the large number of Israeli experts and engineers to put such pipeline projects together.
Other opportunities? Israel soon, I believe, will ratify the Kyoto Protocol and thereafter invest heavily in green power generation options as well as expanding its present conventional power generating capabilities by 30% in the next 5 years. A mandate therefore will be created for the purchase of automotive and industrial emissions controls systems nationwide, to be paid for by the financial and engineering instrument of emissions trading. There is presently not one low-emissions muffler manufacturer in Israel, not one stack gas pollution control manufacturer in Israel, nor a single powerplant manufacturer for the generation of clean power.
Israel?s economy was built up from nothing by machinists, engineers, farmers, welders, aviation techs, and workers in heavy steel. It is wrong to shelve such activities as obsolete when all the evidence points to the contrary, and even more of an evil when one looks at the unemployment figures. What present industrial planning bespeaks is that no one in government is asking the Israel industrial trade associations what Israel needs to continue to grow and prosper, but instead seek only the advice of professional economists, bankers, and piratical entrepreneurs with no desire for a better life for all Israelis, but only for the bottom line.
Israel has but two options from which to choose respecting the growing number of poor regionally and domestically: provide them with the means to feed themselves through industrial development, or to plan on eventually having to kill or incarcerate them all. Today?s youth of both Israel and America needs to go study the posters of Jewish pioneers waving a banner in one hand, and clutching a monkey wrench or welding torch or scythe in the other. That generation was a lot smarter than today?s. Respect for one?s elders? achievements isn?t just a strategy for being nice, and being remembered in the will. It is a strategy and model for national survival.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walter James O?Brien writes from Everett, Washington.
Copyright 2002 Walter James O?Brien