Mango Walk

John Maxwell

Most of the world seems to realise that we are in a ‘perfect storm’ of crises but in Jamaica we seem to be oblivious to everything but “Crime & Violence”.

 In the early 60s we were obsessed by what was then described as ‘ hooliganism’  then later by ‘rude boys’ followed by paranoid fantasies about Communism and, always, since 1974, by ‘garrisons’.

A garrison by most definitions is a constituency held for too long by the other party. Politicians, whether they know it or not are, according to the conventional wisdom,  patrons of the garrison gangs. Its all about ‘politics’, except that most commentators. particularly the most clamant,  don’t understand the politics of the Jamaican ghettos and have no idea what happens in them

One thing will shortly become clear; hunger, frustration and economic injustice are the most effective recruiters for gangsters, for “Crime & Violence”.  As I said last week, quoting Fidel Castro, ‘bullets can kill the poor and the hungry but bullets cannot kill poverty and hunger”.

In the next few weeks and months we will need to confront several urgent crises:

•  Unaffordable  prices for imported food

•  Shortages of food, hoarding and the need for rationing

•  Unaffordable costs  imported fuel

•  Disastrous decline in remittances

•  Big drop in Tourism receipts

•  Big fall off in bauxite exports

•  Probable collapse in export earnings for bananas and sugar because of drought and storm

•  Increasing Unemployment

• Massively burgeoning Triangular trade in drugs and firearms;

For a start

The first thing we need to recognise is that most people are good and kind and reasonable and simply need to know that their humanity is respected and important.

All the adverse conditions above will mean a serious shortfall in government revenue. Even if there were no shortfall, the government would still need massive additional funds to deal with the nine crises listed above.

For instance, it is already clear that the Millennium Highway is on the point of financial collapse. We don’t need accountants to reveal this; a drive on the highway will demonstrate that the road is being avoided by its targeted consumers.  

The fall-off in remittances will be most serious because remittances fuel the bottom levels of the society. Money – masses of it  – will be urgently needed for social support. People are not going to quietly  accept involuntary starvation.

Cruise shipping, will be seriously hit and those few who profit from it will be laying off employees. The doubling of fuel costs will  also devastate air travel and the hotels, adding to the misery, as will concomitant layoffs in entertainment, transport  and ancillary services. We need to cancel new cruise shipping piers and similar instant white elephants such as new superhotels and casinos.

All tax collections will nosedive especially in service industries.

Money

The government will be forced to realise that there is only one way to find the billions of dollars it will need to stave off social dissolution. That money will only be available from our own resources, by withholding perhaps half of our scheduled debt payments. It will be Hobson’s choice: either not pay the creditors or watch the society go up in flames. We can’t borrow our way out of these emergencies

Power

We will need to subsidise public transport,  cooking gas and kerosene or else watch the entire forest cover disappear, followed by the hillside and mountain topsoil.We need to begin restoring and extending the railway

We will need to divert as much investment as possible to the exploration, planning and construction of solar (photovoltaic) and wind turbine power generation and ban all further investment in fossil fuelled power generation --an expensive dead end street.

Food

We need to start NOW distributing seeds and slips -- peas, beans, corn, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, sweet peppers, carrots, coco, tannia, dasheen, yampi, etc and other easily grown backyard crops with high nutritional value.We will need to persuade large landowners, in their own survival interest, to disgorge some of the enormous acreages which they don’t use and don’t need. Right off the bat the government needs to ban all conversion of farmland into non-farm uses and, as the British did in the Second World War, require all landowners to devote at least ten percent of their land to food production.   This will guarantee more food, increased employment and reduced praedial larceny.

We will need to convince shops and supermarkets to restrain their profit taking and to be willing to buy from small suppliers. We will need to establish a new food marketing agency.

Water

We need to realise that we can no longer pretend to be able to afford to squander water for irrigating sugar or for processing bauxite, the demand for food must take precedence.  We need to take back into public ownership the public water supplies recently sold to private traders. We need to recognise the fact that our water is precious, that really WATER IS LIFE, as the NWC slogan has it, and must be under social control.

We need to repair and build new parish tanks and help householders to build or buy their own domestic water storage.

Political cooperation

We need to convince the Americans to put real muscle into halting their sacred firearms export trade.

As I predicted just after the general elections last year, the JLP was likely to lose its parliamentary majority within a few months  and I suggested that the PNP should move extremely carefully in asserting its options. I suggested then and I repeat the suggestion that Bruce Golding and Portia Simpson Miller should get together quickly to arrange how to assign management systems for all the crises we face. We need to involve the entire society at every level to ensure our survival. The public interest demands responsible government and community participation in decision making.

If we didn’t know it before, we are now at the time when our development must be sustainable in the protection of everything we value and all of the people of this once and future blessed isle. We need to understand the need to begin eradicating poverty and developing a survival Agenda – fifteen years late – for the 21st century. Even so, better late than total catastrophe.

The time for serious national and community planning and action is NOW. If we manage to do what we need to do, I am prepared to bet that our crime problem will rapidly begin to subside.

If we don’t do what we need to do I suppose we will need to anticipate a renewed and expanded civil war, starvation and mass misery and emigration.

Not only can we make Jamaica work – We  are at the point where we have no choice.

Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

A Pigeon Among the Cats

John Maxwell

When people leave cults they often turn against their former beliefs with great vehemence. Arthur Koestler’s anthology “The God that Failed” is the perfect exposition of this syndrome. Jamaican communists of the 70s are now among the intellectual leaders of free market theology here. The volte face of such people usually perplexes their friends as much as or more than they baffle their enemies. The people who have fled from the polygamist Mormon sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) are as exotic to those they left behind as if they had come from another solar system.

People like me, who have been so drearily consistent for so long, have taken lots of flak for among other things, our critique of George Bush even before he was anointed President of the US. Millions of ordinary citizens in countries round the world  opposed the looming war in Iraq and demonstrated against it. Then, the  New York Times declared world public opinion to be the new, second superpower. Alas, they paid us no further attention.

 I will never forget our public debate – the Hon. Don Mills and I versus  the US chargé d’affaires   just before the invasion. We knew the “evidence” was invented and that the war was unjustified and wrong. For that we were excoriated. We have now been joined by President Bush’s former Press Secretary who has just published his memoirs detailing how the presidency went off the rails. Scott McClellan was a faithful servant who seemed to be a clumsy and  inept spokesman for the Administration when he stalwartly defended Bush and deflected US media stars  in their febrile impersonations of  journalists.

Now he is being described as a traitor.

McClellan’s book has become a political bombshell even before it comes officially onto the market tomorrow, provoking stunned, disbelieving reactions from his former associates.

Some of us, who have long considered the Bush administration to be a political cult, may be better able understand what has happened.

McClellan’s predecessor, Ari Fleischer says he can’t reconcile the McClellan of the book with the McClellan who was paid to defend Bush.  “There is something about the book that just doesn’t make any sense.”

Fleischer said McClellan had been an “always reliable, solid deputy” during his own White House tenure – but “not once did Scott approach me – privately or publicly - to discuss any misgivings he had about the war in Iraq or the manner in which the White House made the case for war.

The President’s current spokeswoman said Wednesday –

"For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled," Dana Perino said in a statement. "It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."

McClellan’s former associates can’t understand him because they think he has simply and unreasonably changed his mind or gone mad. What has changed is his belief system. As they say in the Bible, the scales have fallen from his eyes. His conscience has sprung rudely into exuberant life.

As Press Secretary,  McClellan was speaking the truth as he received it in the White House. Those who blame him for not making his misgivings known then, while he was doing the job, miss the point entirely; he had no objections then. He was still a card-carrying member of the cult – a true believer.

Scott McClellan has literally been born again, as the cultists say. Neither he nor his critics realise that when he left the White House he was, unknown even to himself, heading down the Damascus road. He is no longer the man they knew.

And what pleases me inordinately is that he now fully justifies my contention, derided  at the time,  that US journalists were acting as Judas goats to the American people As Katy Couric (then NBC now CBS)  and Jessica Yellin (CNN) have now courageously admitted, journalists submitted to pressure from the media owners to join the team, not to rock the boat but to deliver a nice little  war.

I’m sorry I have to say it again, but I told you so at the time.

Return of the floating  barracoons?

Last Monday, May 26. was the 45th anniversary of Cuba’s first venture into what it calls its ‘internationalism’ On that date in 1963 Cuba dispatched a medical brigade to Algeria, then still  bleeding from a successful but incredibly bloody war of independence against France. Fortuitously on the same date in 2008, a  consignment of 4.5 tons of serum, medicines and sanitary materials donated by Cuba arrived in the earthquake ravaged capital of the Chinese province of Sichuan to help some of  those injured in the May 12 earthquake.

In the 45 years between those events the Cuban people have sent abroad as many  health workers as US troops in Iraq--140,000 of them – to more than a hundred foreign countries, some considerably richer than Cuba but all in need of help. They range from Nicaragua to Pakistan, Venezuela to Vietnam, Haiti and Jamaica to Angola and Bolivia. There are more than 10,000 Cubans in Venezuela, teachers, doctors and nurses. In Haiti they were helping the Haitians establish a medical school before they were rudely interrupted by the US Marines – arriving in aid of terrorists and drug-dealers who called themselves Freedom Fighters – coming to kidnap the democratically elected president of Haiti .

The Cubans are also hosts to more than 10,000 young foreigners in Cuban institutions learning everything from building construction to ophthalmology and organic farming.

The Cubans have achieved these and other advances despite having been for half a century the target of unremitting hostility from the world’s only superpower. I happened to be in Cuba on the very day in 1960 the US  – having already sponsored various outrages designed to destroy the Cuban revolution – declared an embargo  against them, an Act of War in international law.

The casus belli  was Cuba’s decision to nationalise with compensation,  the oil refineries, the sugar refineries and the enormous plantations owned by US corporations. If it were true that the US hostility was based on its desire to promote human rights  in Cuba there is no way the American could have simultaneously protected and promoted such bloodthirsty tyrants and terrorists as the Duvaliers (Haiti), Stroessner (Paraguay), Somoza (Nicaragua), Rios Montt (Guatemala) Mobutu (Congo), Jonas Savimbi (Angola), the Cuban terrorists  Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch and Santiago Alvarez and the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

And, if human rights  were the motive, there would not now be five Cubans in American jails whose only crime was to try to warn the US against the activities of exiled Cuban terrorists in Miami.  Nor would there now be living free in Miami notorious Cuban terrorists including those who blew up a Cuban airliner en route from Barbados to Jamaica in 1976 killing nearly  a hundred young people. As Mr Bush has said, those who harbour terrorists are themselves terrorists.

These perverted policies have allowed the US to wreak billions of dollars worth of damage on the Cuban economy and to kill or maim  thousands  of Cubans.

The Cubans have within the last two weeks exposed new US mischief against their country. This involves official US behaviour which is illegal in international law, in US law and in Cuban law. Briefly, the Cubans have submitted   proof that the chief American diplomat in Cuba has acted as a banker and conduit for money and other contraband, between convicted terrorist Santiago Alvarez in Miami and so-called human rights activists  in Cuba. He also intervened with a federal judge to secure a lighter sentence for Alvarez  then awaiting sentencing in Miami.

One sinister collateral disclosure is that there is or was, a plan to create some provocation in Cuba, backed up by American ships parked offshore various Cuban ports. I can imagine that if some agency were able to provoke some  hysterical panic  among Cubans the Americans would no doubt be willing to undertake  a ‘humanitarian’ intervention by the US navy with ships offshore to rescue Cubans ‘fleeing’ their country.

It is a plan which, if applied in Jamaica, would depopulate the country within  hours. Remember the ‘Russian ships’ panic of 1962?

Such a plan to provoke a Cuban exodus a la Mariel would of course, require the assistance of the Jamaican government to allow our ports to be used as temporary staging posts. Which may be why it is a good thing that Mr Golding has not yet been able to visit Mr Bush.

Of course, such a scenario is unthinkable. The Bush administration is much too scrupulous to try to destabilise the Cuban government. And George Bush I am certain, is perfectly content to allow the Revolution to survive its tenth American President.

He has no taste for defeat.

Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

No Economy without Ecology

John Maxwell

I need to begin this week by making a most comprehensive and unreserved apology to the the Fiesta hotel and to the readers of this paper. Last week the caption to my picture of the Fiesta hotel at Lucea made a false statement. The groyne pictured was described as illegal. It isn’t. The operators have a licence for this construction from NEPA – I have been assured. I would like to know however, whether the rest of the caption is correct. There seems to be a visible plume of pollution from limestone in the sea to the west of the groyne. If this is not limestone dust, what is it?

That said, I wish to make it clear that my opinion of the hotel still holds. I think it is a graceless assault on the landscape of Lucea harbour and of Jamaica.

A few days ago The Gleaner has carried one of it fairly regular doom-burdened stories about Jamaica putting off investors. This one was serious

“Spanish Investors Shun Jamaica.”

I am amused.

"We need to have regular contact between Government and the investors and to ensure that the government is still backing Spanish investment," Spanish Ambassador Jesús Silva told The Gleaner.

According to the ambassador, the current atmosphere has to be improved, because the Spanish are operating honest companies, of good quality and the best environmental practices.”

Which suggest of course that any criticism of the Spanish investors is mean-spirited, mistaken and motivated by malice, a suggestion made none too subtly by the advertisement last week in the Gleaner which implied that Butch Stewart and the Observer are out to get the multi-billionaire Spaniards.

I knew Butch had clout, but this is ridiculous.

The real story comes from Majorca, home of some of the Spanish hotel chains. According to a recent story in a Dominican Republic newspaper “Adviser for tourism to Mallorca's Chamber of Commerce, Antoni Munar explained: "Four of the world's top hotel groups come from Mallorca and of these four, two, namely Riu and IberoStar, have hotels in Jamaica. Right now the Baleares Islands (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera) is saturated – there is no more space for hotel development so many hoteliers have to look outside of Spain. Jamaica is a very good market. It has developing infrastructure, close proximity to North America, a strong brand that is recognised throughout the world and has both a mid market and high-end market component. Jamaica makes good business sense."

The Spaniards are not going anywhere. Their investment decisions are governed by the the US recession, by the unhealthy state of the world economy and by their liquidity.

Meanwhile, led by their egregious Ambassador they are targeting Jamaica’s environmental activists among whom I count myself.

 The  Jamaica Environment Trust and the Northern Jamaica Conservation Association have been the special enemies of the Spaniards since they objected to what was happening at Bahia Principe. JET is supposedly in Butch Stewart’s pocket!

Procedures! Procedures!

"There is nothing wrong with the environment. The problem is something maybe with the procedure inside the environmental agency”, Mr Felipe Castellanos, project manager for the hotel. He was right about NEPA; but I took some pictures published in this paper last year showing a beach full of faeces next to the hotel. When I showed this picture to an employee of the hotel at the so-called EIA presentation last year I was told that they  “knew about that”.

And of course they will improve on nature at Pear Tree Bottom. The Ambassador himself, Mr. Silva”said the Pinero Group has made plans to have the indigenous turtle population of the area placed under the guardianship for a future tourists attraction, Furthermore he said much of the coastline would be enlarged and restored.”

Now! How about that!

Perhaps we should ask them to do a makeover on the whole island and make all our wildlife (me included)  into a tourists  attraction. On second thought, that may be exactly what they have in mind.

The idea of chain-ganged  turtles laying eggs on concrete seems a tad outlandish, though.

Threats to the Environment

In Jamaica the major threats to the environment are:

1   Ignorant politicians

2   Ignorant bureaucrats

3   Arrogant developers

4   Climate change

5   Soil erosion

6   Sand-mining and the destruction of mangroves and corals.

7   Large land ownership - latifundism.

8   Unemployment & homelessness

Most of us do not know that of mainland Jamaica’s 488 miles of coastline less than 50 miles may be described as beach. Thirty years ago this was split almost evenly between public bathing beaches/fishermen’s beaches on on side and privately licenced beaches on the other. The UDC’s programme of beach-stealing has changed the balance decisively against the public interest.

In a place like Barbados, smaller than the parish of St Andrew, there is more beach frontage and all beaches are public There is no human interaction  problem in Barbados because the population is integrated into tourism.  All of Negril was intended to be public when Norman Manley opened the first road there fifty years ago. I was present and heard him speak about protecting the amenity and beauty of the area by restricting the elevations of hotels to no more than the height of the  coconut palms. The UDC put paid to all of this in its frenzied attempt to atone for its failure of mission by becoming a property developer.

The threat by the Spanish to concrete the coastline of Jamaica by putting up 20,000 or more rooms should make every Jamaican cringe with horror. The modus operandi of the new investors is to use the hotel to wall off the beach and in the case of Bahia Principe to lay down a concrete substrate on top of which sand is placed. Since mining of beach sand is illegal in Jamaica they must be importing the sand legally from some foreign country. They must, mustn’t they?

And since the legal deficiencies such as exist are the fault of Jamaicans, we should remember the Spanish Ambassador’s threat last year when he warned the parish councils to behave themselves or face unspecified consequences. Shamefully, the then government spokesman  Donald Buchanan, minister of information, added insult to injury when he too cautioned the public servants of Jamaica to give foreign investors a 'bly' to treat them with kid gloves and not to require too high a standard of compliance from them in relation to the laws and regulations relating to the environment. (vide: building applications en Español)

The present Minister of Tourism seems keen to put a hotel on every beach because the investment is huge and thousands of Jamaicans will be employed

The people of Jamaica are entitled to know what sacrifices are to be demanded of us to get these marvelous blessings.

How many Jamaican  jobs in the hotels and at what level of wages?

What is the Prospective tax revenue return to Jamaica by the hotels?

Who will build the housing for these workers and where?

In a world of increasing drought where will we get the water to supply these hotels?

What quantum of food is to be supplied by Jamaican farmers?

I don’t believe Mr Bartlett or anyone else can or will answer any of these questions.

Others can however point with pride to the crime and disease ridden slums which surround every hotel district – in Ocho Rios, Montego Bay and Negril, and which make the real argument for all exclusive hotels.

The Ambassador

The Spanish Ambassador should be asked by the hotel industry to give a lecture on the current state of hotel construction  and de-construction in Spain. to explain the meaning of the phrase ‘Costa del Concrete’ and, explain to them why Spain’s Environment Minister led the European Union in decreeing a compulsory 100 meter setback for all construction on European coasts. Such an assignment would surely keep Mr Silva out of mischief for a few days.

In the meantime we should be asking ourselves whether we want to turn the whole country into a Spanish Free-Zone, fit only for package tourists – like Majorca or the Costa del Concrete. Those Majorcans who don’t work for tourism can relocate to other places in Spain. Where would we go?

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

The essentially criminal consequences of the international capitalist financial system have never been so brutally exposed as by the latest crisis in food and the American mortgage debacle which immediately preceded it.

Jean Ziegler of Switzerland is UN special rapporteur on the right to food and a professor of sociology at the University of Geneva and at the Sorbonne in Paris. At a special emergency UN conference on the food crisis in Geneva a few days ago, Ziegler declared that the massive transformation of foods into biofuels "is an intolerable crime against . humanity."

Ziegler quoted FAO figures revealing that in the last year, the price of wheat rose 130 per cent, rice 74 per cent, soy 87 per cent and corn 53 per cent.

Ziegler said speculation is responsible for 30 per cent of the price hike, particularly on the Chicago Commodities Market, where speculators control 40 per cent of contracts. One company, Cargill, controls a quarter of all cereal production, and has enormous power over the market. He added that hedge funds are also making huge profits from raw materials markets, and called for new financial regulations to prevent such speculation.

The special rapporteur warned of worsening food riots and a "horrifying" increase in deaths by starvation before reforms could take effect.

And the children who die of starvation will die immured in filth, beset by flies and worms and will suffer immeasurably greater pain than the children sacrificed to the sacred fires of Moloch, 4,000 years ago.

In the beginning, capitalism was founded on slavery and it continues to depend on the immiserisation of humanity foreseen by two men born 10 years and an ocean apart -Thomas Jefferson, the godfather of the United States, and Adam Smith, the apostle of capitalism.

When Jefferson, the Virginia gentleman, devised his famous formula defining blacks as three-fifths human, he was making provision for the formalisation of their status as an engine of capitalism, like horse power and steam power. Adam Smith, the Scottish gentleman, was perhaps less explicit: labour, black or white, was simply another factor of production, another resource.

Their heirs today view their activities as perfectly legal, no matter that they condemn the major part of humanity to what even they might consider - if they thought about it - subhuman conditions.

The armies of the MBA are now as disconnected from the misery they engender, as the pilots who bombed Dresden, Coventry, Nagasaki or Vietnamese rice paddies were from the peasants in paddies, the refugees in Dresden or the innocents everywhere. Bayonets compel a recognition that the enemy is human as Jefferson recognised when he raped his young slave, Sally Hemmings. But the essence of the relationship is now transferred to a higher plane - dealing death by incineration or starvation by remote control.

The thousands of young Goldman Sachs traders are mostly unconscious of the fact that their million-dollar bonuses mean the destruction of whole communities and the transition of many of their fellows from citizens to prostitutes and jailbirds. The hedge fund managers who have cornered the market in rice, corn and ethanol may claim not to be aware that they also own much of the market in hunger, starvation, misery and death.

LAND AND HUNGER

In seven months, on January 2009, it will be 50 years since the people of Cuba, led by a few hundred young men and women, seized control of their destinies. Their leader, Fidel Castro, had spent time in jail after conviction on a charge of treason, for raising rebellion against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a friend of the United States.

In his closing speech in his own defence, the young lawyer had laid out in detail the abject position of the masses of the Cuban people and had identified large land ownership, especially by US corporations, as one of the prime factors in Cuban servitude.

On the triumph of the revolution in 1959, the first law promulgated was the Agrarian Reform Law. If I remember correctly, the first words of that Act were:

"Large landholding is henceforth forbidden."

A limit of just over 500 acres was placed on land ownership. The revolution thought that anyone should be able to make a decent living out of 500 plus acres. The revolution believed that foreign ownership of land was against the Cuban interest and that large land ownership - latifundismo - disfranchised and marginalised Cubans, concentrated power in a few hands and was fundamentally undemocratic and anti-social.

The American embargo, now 48 years old, was in response to that law.
Since that time Cuban land ownership and management have gone through many changes into a mix of state farms, cooperative farms and private farms - but all are owned by the Cuban people and operated in their interest.

And that is why, despite the fact that Cuba's per capita GDP is accounted to be below that of Jamaica, there are no starving Cubans, no unemployment and more than two-thirds of the entire Cuban population is enrolled in some level of educational activity.

Cuban schools and universities provide free education to more than 10,000 young people from all over the world, including Jamaica and the United States. It is one of the reasons the Cubans can graduate more than 5,000 medical doctors annually, why there are nearly 20,000 Cuban teachers and doctors in Venezuela, Haiti, Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, and why Cuba was able to offer 1,500 doctors to help New Orleans recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

It is one of the reasons why Cuba, with a population equivalent to that of the rest of the Greater Antilles, has a crime rate comparable to the Jamaican parish of Trelawny, while Puerto Rico and Jamaica, between them, murder about 2,000 of their citizens annually and maim or seriously injure thousands more.

It is long past time to repudiate the debt, cease paying taxes to usurers and use the money to create a civilised society.

PROPERTY, PRIVILEGE AND POVERTY

At this moment the Jamaican people are being asked to surrender their sovereignty on two fronts.

On one side it is demanded - by the privileged and propertied - that the Jamaican Constitution should be changed to accommodate the special interests of foreigners, who want to be able to have the best of two worlds, making money from Jamaica and storing it abroad. We must surrender our sovereign right to rule ourselves so that a privileged caste can make rules for us, rules to suit their interests rather than our interests.

We are told that we clearly have a duty to be poor, a duty to surrender our right to determine how we should use our land, to surrender our beaches and to pay for improvements to the amenities and lifestyles of the rich and irresponsible.

In Montego Bay, a number of Spanish 'investors' have determined that no matter what the Civil Aviation Authority, the National Environmental Planning Agency and the St James Parish Council may say, they have the right to ignore Jamaican law. Having captured one of Jamaica's loveliest public beaches and having in open defiance of the law built a vulgar and monstrous obstruction in the flight path of Sangster Airport, they demand the right to challenge the right of the Jamaican people to run our own country the way we want.

In Spain, at this moment, the Spanish government is busy dynamiting similar excrescences built, as in Jamaica, against the law and the public interest by 'investors' with much more money than social responsibility.

In the pursuit of profit it does not matter to these uncivilised bozos that when a plane in distress hits their hotel, it will be the careless Jamaicans who will be blamed. We will be sued both by the victims' families and by the investors themselves.

I remember an Avianca Lockheed Constellation crashing at Montego Bay airport as it was then called, killing about 40 people. Had that crash happened today instead of 48 years ago, the Riu hotel and everyone in it would have been incinerated.

It was out of that crash - and the recommendation of the inquest that followed - that the first known call was made for the compulsory installation of 'black boxes': flight recorders in all commercial aircraft.
Unfortunately, black boxes can record neither the stupidity nor the cupidity of so-called 'investors'.

Since the entire hotel is in breach of the Jamaican law, the Jamaican law should take its course.

The hotel should be demolished at the expense of the millionaire malefactors who put it up.

We owe them nothing, and certainly not our national integrity or our dignity.

Knock it down!

That's how it is - under the law.

And the Spanish Ambassador does not (yet) sit in our Parliament or in our High Court.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

The Media Mischief Machine

John Maxwell

The very first cookbook I ever bought was a paperback, Plats du Jour, published by Penguin in one of the first postwar attempts to introduce French cuisine to the English. I was charmed by the names of the authors, Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd and the illustrator, David Gentleman.

It was a very good cookbook for a beginner, not least because of its memorable language. among gems I remember – someone 'borrowed' the book years ago, so I can't check – was the injunction to reduce a clove of garlic to an 'almost molecular state' with the point of a sharp knife.

I remembered this injunction as I've watched senior American TV personalities, clothed in the most sententious gravitas, attempting to slice and dice   words attributed to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright in order to cook Barack Obama's goose or at least, make mincemeat out of the probable Democratic candidate for President. Artists in the genre like Lou Dobbs, Wolf Blitzer, Sean Hannity and Hank Scheinkopf have been busy condemning Obama for words allegedly uttered by the former pastor of Obama's church. These august honchos were joined by a mixed bag of newspaper writers like Pat  Buchanan and Charles Krauthammer whose crude attempts at dismembering Obama's reputation resembled nothing more elegant than Jamaican goat thieves  trying to butcher their prey  preliminary to stuffing it into the trunk of their getaway car.

Barack Obama is not the only African American whose reputation came under media fire in the last few days.

The Los Angeles Times, one of the more important US newspapers, has had to apologise to Sean 'P Diddy' Combs, for a story which appeared to tie  him into a felonious assault on rap star Tupac Skakur, later murdered by unknown killers in a lethal rappers' war that also claimed the life of 'Biggie Smalls, aka 'The Notorious Big'

The LATimes story was denounced by The Smoking Gun website, which said the newspaper had been the victim of a hoax, and by subjects of the story, who said they had been defamed.

"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job … I'm sorry". the LAT reporter, Chuck Philips said on Wednesday. The Times has also apologised and is preparing for  expensive reparations to ‘P Diddy’.

I don’t expect any comparable apology from Fox, ABC and CNN or the other mainstream media who framed and defamed Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama using forged – doctored – video excerpts to create seriously damaging 'evidence'.  What these perpetrators of fraud did was to homogenise and blend snippets of sermons including quotes from other people,whipped  into a sauce tartare to mislead people  into swallowing the lie that the pastor had said hateful things about the USA and was not a person for a patriotic American  to be friendly with.

We have had this sort of outrage happen in Jamaica when Mr Seaga, three decades ago, triumphantly produced what he said were tapes from a PNP closed meeting, which turned out to have been doctored to produce shame and scandal in the society.

What the media have done to Wright and Obama could accurately be described as felonious journalism, attempting to pervert the course of democracy and create alarm and panic in the hearts of those who believe that their national integrity is precious and worth protecting and enhancing.

It was not so much an attack on Wright and Obama as it was an attack on the idea of community in democracy itself.

I do not expect any of these bushwackers to apologise. Those who may claim to have been themselves taken in by the forgery are just as guilty as the forgers, because, if they are journalists, they owe a duty to the public interest to ensure that what they publish is, as far as is possible, the truth. They owed a duty to their own integrity and self respect to have made sure that they were not peddling malicious falsehoods or suppressing the truth. They owed it to their human dignity not to have joined a lynch mob but instead  to have attempted as best they might, to protect and safeguard the public interest.

Respect for the public interest is the one guarantee we have against lawnessness and anarchy. As Pastor Niemoller pointed out, if we do nothing to protect our neighbours against lawlessness and tyranny we can hardly expect anyone to speak for us when our turn comes to face the enemies of a free society.

Just Desserts

Jeremiah Wright, in the sermon hijacked by Obama's enemies, was actually calling on the people of the US to examine their consciences, to understand that what happened on 9/11 was, however evil and horrible, explicable in the light of America's treatment of people in the world outside. He was not, as the doctored video appeared to show, celebrating with America;s enemies. He was calling for a kinder, gentler relationship with the rest of the planet. The line about chickens coming home to roost was a quotation from a serving US diplomat who in turn was quoting Malcolm X.

All the media's carving and slicing of the putrid forgery did not do Obama the harm that was clearly anticipated, or at least, none that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) could detect. If the controversy did harm  anyone, it was Obama's opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The WSJ/NBC News poll is conducted by two psephologists, one Republican,  Bill McInturff, and one Democrat, Peter Hart. According to the  WSJ, Peter Hart called their latest poll a 'myth-buster'.  But, the paper said:

"… both Democrats, and especially New York's Sen. Clinton, are showing wounds from their prolonged and increasingly bitter nomination contest, which could weaken the ultimate nominee for the general-election showdown against Sen. McCain of Arizona. Even among women, who are the base of Sen. Clinton's support, she now is viewed negatively by more voters than positively for the first time in a Journal/NBC poll.”

What’s worse from ClInton's perspective is that her lead among white Democrats plummeted  in two weeks by one third, from 12% to 8%  “That seems to refute widespread speculation -- and fears among Sen. Obama's backers -- that he would lose white support for his bid to be the nation's first African-American president over the controversy …"

Compounding the grief is that the poll suggests that in the hypothetical match-up for November, while Obama still edges McCain by 44% to 42% almost the same as before the controversy,  Clinton who had a similar lead, now trails McCain by two points, 44% to 46%.

Even worse news for Hillary is that her ‘positive rating’ has fallen 8 points in two weeks to a new low of 37% while Obama’s fell two points, to 49%. Clinton’s negative rating – at 48% – is now 11 points ahead of her positive rating.

When asked which candidate could unite the country if elected, 60 percent said Obama, 58 percent said McCain and 46 percent said Clinton.

The First Law of Holes

Before this campaign I would never have thought of Mrs Clinton as stupid. Her decision this week to revisit the now moribund Jeremiah Wright controversy casts serious doubt on her nous.

She has broken the First Law of Holes, to wit: When you’ve gotten yourself into a hole, stop digging!

 Clinton  was apparently hoping to deflect attention from her monumental booboo about her visit to Bosnia in 1996 where she said she was sent because it was too dangerous for her husband, then President! She’d  had to run for cover on the Tuzla airfield after landing, she said,  head down against sniper fire. This was easily proved to be a total fabrication and has brought ridicule down upon her head.

One blogger, having viewed the video of the arrival ceremonies at Tuzla airfield sarcastically commented that among Mrs Clinton's tasks that day was to "frisk a suicide bomber disguised as an 8 year old girl”.

Another, then a  UN liaison officer in Bosnia, says “It’s one thing for Mrs. Clinton to ‘misspeak’. It’s more troubling — and a test of her true preparedness for office — for the candidate to totally ignore a major United States policy triumph that took years to broker and somehow claim involvement by inventing a story of sniper fire, while the truth is that she visited a peaceful airfield and met children on the tarmac.”

If Mrs Clinton survives the sniper fire of the Pennsylvania primary in three weeks, I, for one, will be very, very,  surprised.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

'I saw my land in the Evening …'

John Maxwell

"…and, Oh! but she was drear,

Hope, vision and courage gone, fear and failure everywhere"

–(Apologies to M.G.Smith)

We have given up, it seems. Drunk on greed and obsessed by money, most of us seem ready to accept anything preceded by a dollar sign.

We are the foolish virgins, swooning at any temptation, ready to choose ethanol over food and the blandishments of any fool with a gimmick over our own commonsense, willing to discard everything we have learned and accomplished to go whoring after snake oil salesmen with perpetual money machines.

When the next disaster befalls us we will blame everyone but ourselves. It does not occur to anyone that the next storm  -- not necessarily a hurricane --  could make the Palisadoes into what it used to be --a series of islands, reachable only by boat . It does not occur to us that if recession=hit Americans cannot afford cruises we will have destroyed half Jamaica for nothing

We could protect Palisadoes if we wanted, by banning sand mining at Yallahs but we prefer to choose expensive sea defences that will be destroyed if a Hurricane Allen were to make landfall where the 1980 storm was forecast to strike.

We could preserve our beautiful country and its rich heritage if we chose.

We could. We could.

But who will speak and work for Jamaica?

Teenagers and STD

It has has always been more dangerous being a teenager than being anything else.  Scientists know that the human brain doesn't become fully mature until about age 24 which is why gangs, war, fast cars  and reckless behaviour of all kinds is so seductive to young people.

Sex always sees to take us by surprise, and none of us more so than those least prepared. .At a stage where all of life is an experiment, nothing is as intriguing as sex. Which is why children need parents, guides, role models and confessors. But our Christian and some other religious beliefs combine with poverty and ignorance to ensure that most children are abandoned at the time in their lives when it is most crucial for them to be among friends.

The Americans have learned that one in every four  teenage girls has already contracted at least one sexually transmitted disease. Among black girls, African-Americans, the figure is one in two.

A virus that causes cervical cancer - HPV - is the most common STD, followed by chlamydia, trichomoniasis and herpes.

The survey was not screening for  syphilis and gonorrhea. What would those results tell us, one wonders.

In the United States for more than ten years the fight against the lethal pandemic of HIV/AIDs has been founded on preventing the more common STD. It's been found that any STD potentiates the HIV virus, making people more vulnerable to infection and making those infected more productive of the virus and therefore more dangerous to their partners.

Here, we fight HIV through education and propaganda. Our children are experts in HIV but illiterate abut all other STD. It might make more sense if we concentrated on finding and  wiping out all STD instead of  spending millions on surveys which tell us that the propaganda is received but the condoms aren't being used.

I am puzzled by the fact that American researchers in Uganda are now hailing as a great new discovery the fact that circumcised men are several times less likely to transmit HIV or any other STD to their partners. This fact has been known for generations. Jewish and Muslim women, whose men are routinely circumcised, have been for generations known to have a  lower risk of cervical cancer and other STD. The first papers on the effect of circumcision  on HIV transmission is at least twelve years old.

So I do not understand why the Third World is nor ablaze with neon signs telling men to get themselves circumcised in their own and their partners' protection and that the state does not offer free circumcision to all comers. .

Sometimes I feel that the current anti HIV/AIDS campaigns are a modern equivalent of the notorious Tuskegee study, when black men with syphilis were regularly examined by federally paid doctors but not treated until 30 years after penicillin was known to cure the disease.

Obama and Racism

One of the more surprising features of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is its racism. While she was ahead all was sweetness and light. When she started losing primaries people in her campaign began to reveal their true feelings about black people. Bill Clinton himself tried to downplay Barack Obama’s importance –  just another black making a sectarian statement, like Jesse Jackson 20 years before. Clinton herself and other surrogates have embarrassed themselves by other snide, racist references including attempts to smear Obama as a Muslim and, by inference a friend of terrorists.

Another serial denigrator of blacks is Geraldine Ferraro, who twenty years ago – then an obscure Congresswoman, was selected to be Walter Mondale’s vice presidential running mate against George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle.

Last week, Ferraro, now a member of the Clinton election team, delivered herself of the judgment that “if Obama was (sic) a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman – of any colour – he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Does she mean that  Obama is the beneficiary of some national pro-black hysteria ?

Ben Smith points out in the Politico blog that Ferraro said the same thing 20 years ago –  about Jesse Jackson 

 Smith  quotes from a story written by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post in 1988

“… President Reagan suggested Tuesday that people don't ask Jackson tough questions because of his race. And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that because of his "radical" views, "if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race." In  1988 Jesse Jackson dismissed Ferraro (and Reagan)  saying “while I’m making history some are making hysteria.”

Obama can’t say the same thing of course. Hillary would accuse him of felonious plagiarism. And when the Obama campaign accused the Clinton campaign of racism, Ferraro came roaring back. Defending herself, she accused Obama of twisting her words: . 'Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist,' she said. 'I will not be discriminated against because I'm white.….'"

      Ferraro exposes her existential racism,   raising up a whole panoply of racist spectres going back to the Civil War. This seems ingrained in the Clinton campaign, betrayed, as Orlando Patterson points out by the racist symbolism embedded in the Clinton TV commercial asking who would Americans want picking up the red phone in the White House when something dangerous was happening in the world

(See ‘The Red phone in Black & White’    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/opinion/11patterson.html

The Clinton campaign has no intention of playing by the rules, elastic as they are. Clinton like every other candidate, accepted the Democratic National ?Committee’s decision to discount the primaries in Michigan and Florida, because the state parties broke the rules. Clinton’s name was the only one on the ballot in Michigan. In Florida Obama and other candidates were on the ballot only because it was impossible to remove them.  In both states, however, Clinton’s surrogates campaigned while the others didn’t. Hillary herself made strategic fund-raising appearances in both states including a ‘Thank You’ appearance in Florida on the night of the discredited primary. In Michigan where  hers was the only  name on the ballot she claims that Obama did campaign. The reason: when Obama spotted the Clinton strategy he told  his supporters to vote ‘uncommitted’ . 

Clinton has been claiming that she ‘won’ Michigan and Florida where no valid ballots were cast for anyone. People did go to vote on ‘primary’ day in order to vote for various state initiatives. Many didn’t bother believing that rules were rules.

Clinton has been joined by elements of the press, who, determined to sow as much confusion as possible, continue to report that she “won” primaries that never took place.

As I said last week, this Presidential campaign will be the dirtiest in history.

I’ve been wondering whether Hilary realises that she is in danger of making her corner of the Democratic party into a modern version of Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats. With a little help from Ralph Nader, Clinton may  guarantee an opening for  Jeb Bush  as John Mc Cain’s running mate and an opportunity  to secure  the American monarchy left vacant since George III.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Billionaire Bangarang

John Maxwell

There are basically two kinds of people in the world: those with too little money and those with too much. Those with too much between them control nearly half the world’s wealth, could;d fit comfortably in two or three jumbo jets.

According to Forbes magazine, the global stock of billionaires increased  from 793 in 2006 to 946 in 2007 – a comfortable audience for the Ward Theatre. According to figures from the United Nations University/WIDER, the richest 1% of the world’s population — about 37 million people own 40% or nearly half of the world’s people,   while the  bottom half — nearly two billion people, together own just about one percent of the world’s assets.

In these computations, wealth does not include houses, however grand, nor transportation Rolls Royces or personal jets.

The world — or at least some parts of it is in the throes of a billionaire problem; A Wall Street journal columnist reported last October on a visit to the super rich ski resort of Aspen Colorado and says he was struck by the number of rich people in town and by the number of locals who complained about the number of rich people in town.

Since our new tourism thrust is premised on the attraction of the super rich I decided to do  little research into possible problems.

The rich do have one nasty habit: they keep on getting richer while the rest of us get poorer. In Aspen that causes problems. Natives can’t afford houses in their own town anymore. The price for a single family unit begins at US$ 5 million (about J$ 350 million) Not even doctors can afford to buy houses in Aspen any more.  People are worried that there are too many Prada and Gucci stores in town and I would hate to imagine the price of a bottle of Perrier water or a Blue Mountain coffee.

I can just imagine it. I am the guest of some billionaire in Aspen and the party is on her. So, to impress her a little bit I take her to the nearest Starbucks (or the billionaire equivalent) an order two coffees. I then discover that I have to pawn my plane ticket to pay for them.

The rich grow richer effortlessly, but some of them, of course, like to grease the skids even though they know the lolly is coming down in floods anyway As we have seen in the united States, the middle class of that country, particularly  the black middle class is undergoing a painful process of wealth extraction, taken to the cleaners by mortgage brokers and their outlaw in-laws in the derivatives business.

This has created a small problem, because though billions have been sucked out of the middle-class, some of it has almost literally vaporised into the high altitude world of sophisticated financial products, or derivatives, in which sub-prime mortgages were valued by eminent bankers as better than sovereign bonds issued by Jamaica or Venezuela or even the US itself.

‘Wealth creation’  depends eventually on the players finding a great number of what they call ‘Greater Fools’ willing to come in at the zany end of the market. The theory is that if millions of naive punters lose their shirts the loss will be spread over wide areas and no one will take too much notice.

But the ‘wealth creation’ game depends on a high velocity of circulation, with each hand retaining a smidgen of the gold dust that attaches to the securities which zip through the system like pork fat through a goose. Wealth cannot be created or destroyed. I have no intention of going into the theory of surplus value but you can take it from me that there is sweat is the real currency of the world and the source of all wealth. The transmutation of sweat into money and profit is what makes the world go round, but while the Earth may appear to be a perpetual motion machine there is no human system which can duplicate its effects for more than a moment.

So while wealth is extracted from middle class Americans and workers all over the world, eventually, classical economics and common sense all tell you that sales and profits depend on markets and markets depend on people and people depend on earnings and the whole structure collapses when the working class is gutted, as is happening at this moment.

Greed is the frictional element. If capitalists could be satisfied with ‘rational’ profits, all would be well. But they are not. Which is why the take home pay of the American workers has stagnated at 1973 levels and the wealth of his masters has expanded exponentially meanwhile.?

As Professor James Petras points out in an article (www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=PET20070323&articleId=5159) published last year, the rise of the billionaires was accompanied by serious social problems. Mass uprisings became commpnplace in India and China.

“In India, which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total wealth of $191 billion, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to 'India's security' were the Maoist-led guerrilla armies and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country. In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion net worth, the new rulers, confronting nearly a hundred thousand reported riots and protests, have increased the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundred fold, and increased spending for the rural poor by $10 billion in the hopes of lessening the monstrous class inequalities and heading off a mass upheaval.”

IT may surprise you to discover that in the United States, one in every 100 adult Americans is in jail.  That amazing statistic includes one in every nine black men between 20 and 34 and one in every hundred adult black women behind bars.

Mind boggling.

Disparity in Growth

Petras said the total wealth of this global ruling class grew  35% per year while income levels for the lower 55% of the world’s people declined or stagnated. While General motors and Ford lay off thousands of workers the Federal Trade Commission is besieged by reports of millions of toxic toys from China flooding the market and Lou Dobbs on CNN is pathetically demanding action against Mexican and other illegal immigrants and some drastic surgery perhaps, on NAFTA.

Petras also deals with the “the newest, youngest and fastest-growing group of billionaires, the Russian oligarchy stands out for its most rapacious beginnings. Over two-thirds (67 per cent) of the current Russian billionaire oligarchs began their concentration of wealth in their mid to early twenties. During the infamous decade of the 1990s under the quasi-dictatorial rule of Boris Yeltsin and his US-directed economic advisers, Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar the entire Russian economy was put up for sale for a 'political price', which was far below its real value. Without exception, the transfers of property were achieved through gangster tactics ­ assassinations, massive theft, and seizure of state resources, illicit stock manipulation and buyouts. The future billionaires stripped the Russian state of over a trillion dollars worth of factories, transport, oil, gas, iron, coal and other formerly state-owned resources.”

Globalisation, it is clear, does work for some.

The Obama Charisma

The fact that it doesn’t work for most of us is one of the factors behind the steamroller effect of Barrack Obama’s charismatic appeal. People see in him an answer to their frustrations with a government that does not seem connected to their concerns, their lives and their welfare.

The press, bless their hearts, are in a state of total confusion, incessantly   parsing language and producing every day some new piece of intelligence which would a few years ago, have had the American electorate in a flutter. The problem is that the electorate is paying almost no attention to the conventional media or to their delegates in politics, the John McCains and the Bill Clintons.

An almost unnoticed development last week suggests that the American political system, like the economic structure, is in for a seismic shock.  In the rock-ribbed Yankee Republican region of Upstate New York, in a seat held by Republicans for a century, a Democrat beat the wealthy Republican candidate in a special election. It was a seat with nearly 80,000 registered Republicans nearly twice as many as the 47,000 Democrats. The New York State senate has been controlled by Republicans for all but two years since 1939.

The prospect of Obama is scaring the Republicans silly. The one thing preventing an unprecedented flood of money for John McCain is that when his campaign seemed all but dead some six months ago, he entered into a deal with the Federal Elections Commission for public financing. Now that the Obama heat is on and billionaires are waiting in line to give him money, he wants to get out of the arrangement, but the FEC can’t even vote on his request because it has no quorum.

The result is that the real Republican campaign will be effectively financed from outside McCain’s purview by the kind of people who financed the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry in the last election. That means that this election campaign, despite the civility and sophistication of Barack Obama and Mr McCain’s pious burblings, is going to be by far the dirtiest in the history of the United States.

You read it here first.

Criminal Libel and Hate mongering

Poppyshow at Runaway Bay

John Maxwell

Perhaps the Spaniards were tempting fate by deciding to put a hotel near Runaway Bay, a place with such unfortunate historical associations for them.
      Or perhaps they came to avenge a four hundred year old defeat. Whatever it is, the Spanish-owned Bahia Principe at Pear Tree Bottom, near Runaway Bay, has caused more than its fair share of controversy, bad feelings and environmental problems.
      On Monday afternoon last more than a hundred people assembled at Runaway Bay for what was advertised as a public consultation on an Environmental Impact Assessment of certain aspects of the hotel. That was what it was supposed to be.
               It was, instead, a shambolic, confused, totally irrelevant melange of misconceptions and confusions, good-natured for the most part but occasionally spiced with a little malice. The meeting was conducted – if that’s the word – with  splendid incomprehension of what a public  EIA consultation should be.
      I won’t blame the people on the platform, two of whom (Jamaicans)  represented the Spanish interests and one,  the chair, the interests of the local Chamber of Commerce. The people to blame were the National Environmental Planning Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Authority(NRCA/NEPA) who miserably abdicated  their legal responsibility.
      There was an apology for absence from NEPA/NRCA which was perhaps understandable. They managed to foul up almost every aspect of the regulation of the hotel including the EIA, the fact that the hotel is built on a public beach, illegally, and the sanitary arrangements and otherenvironmental protections which ought to have been built into any permit for any hotel anywhere in the world, but especially in an environmentally sensitive and important Jamaican wetland, fronting a world famous and scientifically important coral reef.
       Certain elements of the meeting were apparently brought there to give (largely muscular) testimony on behalf of the hotel and the bottom line. People like Dr the Rev Frank Lawrence,  Diana MacCaulay , Wendy Lee and myself were portrayed as being simply anti-development. A simple question from Dr Lawrence about the capacity of the hotel’s sewage system was never answered. It was the first question asked.
 I attempted to point out that a public consultation was supposed to be an important and integral part of the developmental decision making process  as recognised in the NRCA Act, in the Treaty of Rio and a slew of other treaties, conventions and international protocols.
      An Environmental Impact Assessment is first of all, supposed to decide whether any development is really necessary, whether it is necessary in any specific place and whether it is worth the investment that the community is asked to make in surrendering space, amenity and foreclosing alternative uses, to accommodate ‘development’.
      When I was Chairman of the NRCA thirty  years ago we had precious little legal weaponry to stop bad developments. However, by suasion and by mobilising public opinion we were generally able to get developers (with the exception of the UDC)  to obey the laws and common sense, to realise  that allowing hotels to defecate on their own doorsteps was not wise or healthy, that it was crazy to dig up the Negril Morass for massively polluting peat and so forth. We even managed to get Doctors’ Cave Bathing Club to obey the law and stop discriminating against Jamaicans.
      The new NRCA/NEPA, armoured and equipped with all kinds of heavy legal weaponry, seems to have no clue as to how to employ its power to advise and if necessary, to compel developers to  behave as if they were civilised. A very distinguished scientist who helped advise the NRCA during my time, has  told me that the only way to go now was to abolish the present NRCA/NEPA and replace it with the kind of professional organisation we had in  the 70s.
      The problem with the NRCA is not only with its regulatory negligence. Thirty years ago the NRCA was able to mobilise public opinion on the question of Kingston Harbour and we were only frustrated by the intervention of the IMF which managed to halt almost every progressive impulse of the then government by the simple means of economic threats and menaces.
      That is no longer possible.

Access to Justice

Developers in Europe now have to deal with, among other things, the Arhus Convention, which legally guarantees the rights of ordinary people in the developmental process.
This convention is global in its dimensions and almost certainly applies to the activities of European entities outside of Europe and therefore to the owners of the Bahia Principe.
“ It is by far the most impressive elaboration of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, which stresses the need for citizen's participation in environmental issues and for access to information on the environment held by public authorities." These principles, believe it or not, are also enshrined in the Jamaican NRCA’s  guide to the conduct of Environmental Impact Assessments.
      “The Convention adopts a rights-based approach. Article 1, setting out the objective of the Convention, requires Parties to guarantee rights of access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters. It also refers to the goal of protecting the right of every person of present and future generations to live in an environment adequate to health and well-being, which represents a significant step forward in international law.” (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe http://www.unece.org/env/pp/contentofaarhus.htm)
      The Spanish Costa del Sol is more than  400 miles of beach and rugged coastline, once admired for its ravishing views, and the grandeur of its landscape.Its attractiveness to visitors has dropped precipitously, because,  over the past forty years in the name of development, Spanish local and central government authorities have allowed this coastline to be disfigured and exploited and uglified by get rich quick hoteliers and real estate salesmen.

Dynamite and the Concrete Coast

      The Costa del Concrete – Concrete Coast – as it is now nicknamed, is a soulless parade of concrete monstrosities, fencing off the local populations from their beaches and repelling tourists by its industrial character.
      Public revulsion has driven the Spanish government to take action.  All along this 400 mile coast, hotels and illegally built condominiums and holiday cottages are being razed, bulldozed or dynamited, in an attempt to recapture, some vestige of the real Costa del Sol.

The Costa del Sol is only a fraction of Spanish seacoast.

 Jamaica’s entire coastline is 480 miles, and only about 40 miles of that is beach of any kind. When I was fired from the NRCA by Mr Seaga, 28 years ago, the public had guaranteed access to 20 miles of fishing and bathing beach. No one can now tell you how much of that is still open to the ordinary Jamaican or ordinary visitor who is not a guest in a sea-front hotel.
      Things may get better. According to the Christian Science Monitor – a month ago, Spain and its neighbours along  all 29,000 miles of Mediterranean shore have agreed that no construction is to be permitted on the 100 meters (about 328 feet) of land nearest the water.
      At a meeting in Almeira, on the Costa del Concrete,  one of the prime movers in this initiative was Jose Fernåndez Pérez,  Director of Coasts in Spain’s ministry of Environment. He implored his international colleagues to initiate “radical change” in coastal management. “The old models of managing the coastline are exhausted”, he said.
      Someone ought to inform the Spanish Ambassador here about his government’s policies. The new injunction not only preserves the coastline for the public, it protects the investments from most of the serious damage likely to be caused by global warming, sea-level rise and related effects such as hurricanes and storm surge.
      The government of Jamaica should pay attention. Now that we have been dragged unprotesting into the latest incarnation of the viciously predatory MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) via the exploitative Economic Partnership Agreements, the sole benefit is that we now have access to the Arhus Convention and to the European Court.
      That should make life very interesting for developers public or private,  who want to steal our patrimony, disfigure our landscape and degrade our environment and for their abettors. The Runaway Bay meeting was a nullity, illegal and a comprehensive waste of money and everybody’s time.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

Genocide a la bonne femme

John Maxwell

We have some great news for dieters this week!

The Haitians, with a little help from the Americans, the French and the Canadians, have produced a solution to the obesity crisis that now threatens western civilisation.

Haiti’s great and good friends in Washington, Paris and Ottawa have,  at last, after several years of hard, grinding effort, managed to create the condition known as ‘critical mess’  [sic] allowing the Haitians to produce a diet which — unlike any other slimming solution — is absolutely guaranteed to work. Other slimming solutions have always had one weak spot: no matter how low-calorie the diet is, dieters can always defeat the purpose by overeating.

 The new Haitian diet makes that impossible! No matter how much you eat you will not get fat !!

This is sensational news!!!

Here for the information of our avid readers is the recipe, direct from the street vendors of Port au Prince

One caveat: the special ingredient may have to be imported from Haiti. We haven’t yet found a gourmet specialty shop in North America which stocks the main ingredient — Glaise de Plateau Central — a special kind of clay from the Central Plateau of Haiti. This clay is yellowish in colour and the best grades contain lots of healthy calcium, guaranteed to make your bones stronger even as your too, too solid flesh melts away.

Method

Take enough Glaise de Plateau Central and dry it in the sun.

Pound (in a mortar) and sieve the  dried  glaise, to remove any small stones, twigs, insect parts, bird droppings or other visible impurities.

Add a little water, enough to make a soft dough

Add a little fat and a soupçon of salt (gros sel, pounded fine)

Mix all together forming small — say 2 inch — cookies.

Expose to the sun on a zinc sheet  (beaten as flat as possible)

When dry your mud pies are ready to eat.

Bon appetit!!!

It may sound better in French but it is genocide in any language

‘And so say all of us!’

 The Haitians are giving new meaning to the phrase ‘dirt poor’.

Four years after the Americans, Canadians and French beheaded democracy in Haiti it is now clear that a Final Solution is in sight for the 200 year old  Haitian  problem.

Almost exactly three years ago , on January 30, 2005, I wrote in this column in this paper  about the world’s commemoration of the liberation of  the Auschwitz murder factory sixty year before

‘Elie Weisel, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, said eloquently:

 “In those times those who were in the death camps felt not only tortured and murdered by the enemy, but also tortured and murdered by what they considered to be the world’s silence and indifference .”

 ‘ “ … Those who committed the crimes were not vulgar, underworld thugs, but men with high positions in government, academia, industry and medicine.”  Weisel said.

I wrote then: ‘The world is remembering Auschwitz and the Holocaust. It is not paying any notice to the 200 year  Holocaust  still underway in Haiti. There too, the people in hazard must feel tortured and murdered by the indifference of a world conned into believing that the high-minded leaders of the United States, France, Canada and Brazil have the interest of the Haitian people at heart when their agents torture, murder, maim and rape Haitians for no better reason than that they support their democratically elected and unconstitutionally removed President, Jean Bertrand Aristide.’

That was in 2005.

Since then the Haitians have continued to languish in suffering. They have had their leaders kidnapped, tortured and murdered, innocent women and children have been killed by the UN occupation forces working to eliminate the enemies of the Haitian ruling elite, the destruction of  Haitian democratic organisation meant the death of thousands from hurricane, floods and other natural disasters, and they have waited for hours in the heat of the sun to cast their votes hoping that those votes would have meant a better life for them, or at least a chance for a better life.

That hasn’t happened.

Haiti is still paying for the foreign aid gormandised by the Duvaliers and their allies and they still have no roads, no hospitals, and their medical school started by Aristide with the aid of the Cubans is now the site of the barracks of the occupying forces.

These Haitians are the people who helped the Americans win their independence, destroyed the Americans ambitions of Napoleon, destroyed slavery and accelerated the abolition of the slave trade.

They are guilty on all counts and obviously deserve to be punished. They inhabit one of those places Mr Bush called ‘the dark corners of the world.’

Three years ago, at the Holocaust commemoration the US vice president Mr Cheney delivered himself of these  words:

 ” …these great evils of history were perpetuated not in some remote, uncivilised part of the world, but in the very heart of the  civilised  world. … Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine. Therefore we must teach every generation the values of tolerance and decency and moral courage. And in every generation, free nations must maintain the will, the foresight and the strength to fight tyranny and spread the freedom that leads to peace.”

And so say all of us!  And so say all of us!! And so say all of us !!!

Meanwhile, the Haitians eat dirt.

Gimmick Development

Caribbean culture — the product of a tiny proportion of the world’s people, is awesome. We have produced Jean Jacques Dessalines,  Marcus Garvey, Fidel Castro and Norman Manley, Capablanca and George Headley, Alexandre Dumas, Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott, Ernesto Lecuona, Bob Marley and the Mighty Sparrow, Karl Parboosingh and Cecil Baugh, Colin Powell and Malcolm X to name only a few who have changed the world. Visitors to the region, especially to Jamaica, are unlikely to discover any of this.

Caribbean culture is the magnet that draws foreign visitors to these countries but once they get here, they could be anywhere.

They don’t eat Caribbean food or meet Caribbean people or hear any but the most formulaic, tired Caribbean music.

There are exceptions of course. But Caribbean tourism is largely not a Caribbean product. The people who are the stewards of the flame that draws the visitors have very little part in the industry. In Jamaica the people are losing their beaches and even their landscapes to so called ‘developments’ which accord no respect nor pay attention to their Jamaican context. 

The Jamaica of song and story is replaced by petting zoos featuring captive camels parakeets and dolphins and other exotica imported from other places.

‘Development’  in Jamaica follows the maxim quoted in the 1954 World Bank Report on Jamaica: “In Jamaica, the absolute ownership of land means in practice the absolute right of the owner to ruin the land  in his own way.” These days one does not  even have to be the absolute owner. If, like Robert Cartade, one can persuade the right people one can get permission to destroy Hope Gardens and if the ‘proles’ protest too much, Long Mountain instead. If you are the government you can pour concrete and sterilise an area half the size of Hanover to build a Doomsday Highway that, as I predicted, will be impossible to pay for. We can try to rescue disastrous developments like the Port Antonio Marina by making an even bigger bet on a new airport. (for flying yachts?) We can destroy Falmouth so that financiers can make millions from cruise ships before they are sunk by the price of petroleum in five or ten years.

We can destroy Kingston Harbour by pollution or by dredging and we are now told that the parish of Portland is so beautiful and so attractive that it must be saved for foreigners and covered with villas and other attractions which will change it into Las Vegas by the sea.

The latest ‘development’ proposals for St Thomas mean that the people will give up some of the most valuable farmland in Jamaica for our fourth — fourth! international airport. Jamaica already has one mile of roadway for every square mile of land. We will now have one international airport for every thousand square miles of land or  one international airport for every 200 square miles of reasonably level land.

And all this is to be done without consultation with the Jamaican people whose sacrifice is essential for these ‘developments’. Although we are bound by the Treaty of Rio, by the Cartagena Convention and other national and international laws, the people of Jamaica will be asked to yield their treasure as the Arawaks/Tainos were ‘asked’ to yield theirs.

“I claim this land in the name of Development!”   So There!

Give us a break.

Endnote: Is it just me? Or is anyone else disturbed by the heavy promotion of the film “Vantage Point”  on CNN in concert with news reports and programmes about the US party presidential primaries. ‘Vantage Point” is about the assassination of an American President,  and the promos, especially when they follow Barack Obama political advertisements, give me the creeps.

Copyright©John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com