Yigal Sarna
Privatized to death
Israelis increasingly plundered, robbed by government-backed corporations
One warm afternoon I walked into Michael’s store and waited to be served. Michael has been serving me for many years now. He is a hard-working, punctual man, working from morning until night in the same profession his late father engaged in. I grabbed a newspaper to pass the time, while listening to Michael speaking on his cell phone. I was horrified and choked up.
“My wife died of cancer,” Michael told someone on the other end. “And my son lost his mind because of it and is currently hospitalized in a mental institution. You spoke to him while he was at home on vacation. He’s insane and he cannot decide or sign anything.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” I told Michael. “When did all these disasters take place?” Yet he just hushed me. I’m talking with the cable company, he whispered, and the conversation continued with its aggressive-apocalyptic tones. When it ended, he told me: “Everything is alright. My wife is alive, and my son is a student. I’m merely trying to disconnect from my cable provider.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Yet this is not a story about one company or another. Rather, it is a story about the way corporations grab hold of us, with the State’s permission. It’s a report from the front where our lives, our property, and our bank account had been privatized.
The meticulous Michael takes a look at his bank account every day to see how much he is being charged by various companies that cling onto him like greedy leeches. This is the kind of review not many people do. I don’t either. Yet in Israel, where decency had been lost and citizens have no real protector or regulator, a person can spend most of his life performing such reviews.
Michael looks for and spots mishaps every month. You can call them tiny cases of fraud. Just like a store owner or taxi driver who gives you too little change and waits to see whether you’ll notice and ask for what he owes you. When it comes to retail, fraud has declined greatly. The poor people are more decent. Yet in the all-powerful corporate world, such fraud is the norm.
Israel’s liquidation sale
Michael showed me lines upon lines of credit for services he never asked for. He demanded his money, and got it back following Sisyphean efforts. Twenty shekels here, 15 shekels there. Small change for one person, but the accumulation of it grows into huge amounts of money for the corporations.
A friend told me that in Argentina there are some homes that post the following signs: “We do not allow the water gauge readers in. Water is a national resource that belongs to all of us.” Yet how far are we from being that way. How deeply we capitulated to any government bill and caprice. We’re facing so much plunder that we forgot the basics: The State was established in order to protect us from plunder and robbery, yet with the passage of years it has turned into our main plunderer and robber, via its sub-contractors and privatization hedonists.
In the past 20 years, we’ve had a liquidation sale here. Now, in order to free ourselves from a contract with the cell phone or cable company, from our Internet or gas provider, we need to embark on a battle against corporations surrounded by walls of indifferent automated phone systems and thousands of workers whose only aim is to prevent the right of disconnection from you.
Michael told me what pushed him to adopt the desperate measures I witnessed. He discovered that he received a channel package he had no interest in, and decided to disconnect. The corporation’s representative made this very difficult. It’s easier to get Foreign Minister Lieberman to agree to a Palestinian state than to convince a corporate service representative. The next day they called his home. His son answered, and being unaware of his father’s wishes, he agreed to sign up for a bigger package.
When I arrived at his store, Michael was in the midst of his liberation war, drawing on disease, bereavement, and madness in order to extract himself from a contract.
