Entries tagged with commentary

Entry tags:

commentary

The Poll of the Baskervilles

John Maxwell

Sanguivorous –bloodsucking – leeches are an extremely low form of life, a kind of worm which is basically an animated alimentary canal. There is a mouth at one end provided with teeth used to perforate the skin of its prey and nothing but a gut until the other end of the animal where there is an anus.

Sanguivorous leeches can ingest several times their own weight in blood at one meal. After feeding the leech retires to a dark spot to digest its meal Some leeches will even take a meal from other sanguivorous leeches which may die after the attack.

I first came upon leeches – or rather they came upon me – about forty years ago in a water-meadow – a pasture – in Berkshire, England, where I had been admiring a herd of cattle of a kind I hadn’t seen before Afterwards, as I was cleaning my boots of the mud and cattle dung I realised that there were about half a dozen ugly little worms attached to my calves, just above my socks. They were leaches, sucking my blood. I persuaded them to cease and desist by bringing a lighted cigarette near to one end of each leech, when the other end let go falling to the ground to await another food supply.

( continued after cut )

I am reminded of leeches by the activities of some people who masquerade as journalists both here and abroad.

Their modus operandi is simple; they sink their teeth into people who they esteem as more important than they, hoping that the blood they may draw may bestow upon them some of the attributes of their hosts. Which is why people like Wolf Blitzer, Glenn Beck and others on CNN and Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity and many others on the Fox network in the US spend so much time putting the needle into people they fear or hold in awe In Britain the stimulus is more sex than power. In Jamaica, as in every other activity, leeches are not specialists. They are omnivorous. But whatever their prey, the idea is to draw attention to themselves. Talk show hosts, newspaper columnists and cartoonists can be found among the ranks of leeches. One of the most egregious gets his rocks off by an annual exercise in denigrating those he considers his superiors. The proprietor of this newspaper and I (a “Jurassic fossil”) are among his latest targets. I am delighted to be among his bêtes noir. I am specially gratified because this is at least my third or fourth time on one of his lists.

Even Tyrannosaurus Rex had his leeches – as I can personally attest. In any case, a man may be known by his enemies.

A public trust

Journalism is allegedly a public trust in which journalists and their employers are supposedly committed to the protection and defence of the public interest – acting as guides, counsellors, sentries and guards as we report, discuss, analyse and advise on the vents and developments in our environments.

These self-assigned duties and responsibilities mean that the successes and failures of our societies are intimately related to the performance of journalists. Many of us are quick to criticise our societies and governments as careless, corrupt, brutal and uncaring forgetting that if the societies and governments are so, we are part of the reason they got that way.

Journalists are now criticising the Jamaican police for brutality, having spent forty years conniving at and condoning police murder because they thought it was in their interest. In the United States journalists condemn racism while being in the forefront of the promotion of prejudice. American journalists still find it difficult to adopt stances against torture and other corruptions and breaches of the US constitution because they connived at and condoned the stealing of voters rights in the ‘election’ of their chosen hero, George Bush in 2000 and 2004.

And soon – wait for it – they will begin a wholesale official assault on the usurers and shysters who conned a substantial number of blacks, Hispanics and other poor people out of billions of dollars and cheated them out of hundreds of thousands of houses. They will probably not attack however, the banks and finance houses that enabled and financed the usurers and made (and have now lost) billions of dollars in the casino that is the free market. In the last few weeks some of these loses have been revealed: Citibank alone has written off 22 billion dollars in bad mortgages and bad loans, Merrill Lynch perhaps as much as 30 billion and other banks and assorted financial houses like Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, the American Insurance Group, Barclays and HSBC have written off or lost billions more, leading central banks and the financial establishment to try to finance a $75 billion bailout fund to avert a complete and universal meltdown in financial markets. These astronomical sums were the proceeds of funds sucked out of the poorest sectors of working class America. The total involved is more than the Gross National Products of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica combined.

And then, of course, there is New Orleans.

What happened is that the banks accepted IOUs from mortgage lenders and sold packages of IOUs/mortgages as new ‘ investment products’ that were traded as if they represented real assets, being sold at increasing discounts to other speculators who figured that eventually the investment products or ‘derivatives’ as they are called, would mature, as they say and everybody would get a piece of the action. These derivatives are are simply a way for the private sector to print their own money – the very sin against which they rail when governments do it. Governments of course, can’t go bankrupt and unlike the private sector have to pay their debtors one way or another. And when the private sector money printing machine crashes, it is governments – ordinary taxpayers – that must come to the rescue to prevent the total, catastrophic dislocation of their economies and societies.

The private sector are paid astronomical sums, win or lose. Stan O’Neil, head of Merrill Lynch took home a parting gift amounting to more than $200 million and the head of the disastrous Countrywide mortgage company took home more than $250 million for the last two years sterling work in digging his company and its clients into a multibillion dollar hole.

The winners do even better, with rank and file employees of Goldman Sachs, for instance, sharing nearly $20 billion, almost a million dollars each for their part as winning bookmakers in the capitalist bucket shop.

As they say – the invisible hand is faster than the eye and the financial sector is nothing more than the world’s largest floating crap game.

In all of this the journalists of the world are too intimidated to emulate the little boy who noticed that the Emperor's new clothes did not exist. Instead the press are the Judas Goats of capitalist speculation, leading their fellows to slaughter or forced labour for the greater profit of their employers and patrons.

Why the dog did not bark

In the mystery of “the Hound of the Baskervilles” as Sherlock Holmes noted, the most important piece of evidence, the major ‘clue’ was the curious fact that the dog did not bark when the intruder entered the house to commit his foul crimes. . To Holmes this fact pointed to the perpetrator; dogs don’t bark at intruders they know and love. It was an ‘inside job’.

Last week Hilary Clinton won a spectacular ‘victory’ in the New Hampshire Primary against all expectations and to the great consternation and astonishment of almost everybody. “How did the polls get it so wrong” was the typical question asked by newspaper and television pundits.

It was an odd question, because apart from this rogue result, the polls got everything thing else spot on.

What was so odd about Clinton’s ‘victory’ as I pointed out last week was the fact that people questioned after they’d voted said Obama was more likely to be elected president than Clinton. This conformed with what the voters said they had done in the voting booths but not what the election results said. What was strange was that Clinton got the votes predicted for Obama and Obama got the votes predicted for Clinton. In every other respect the exit polls were accurate

Even John Zogby – the most accurate pollster – seemed to feel constrained to agree with his sometimes statistically illiterate critics: “Going into the New Hampshire primary, we certainly did see Clinton holding on to a significant lead among women and older voters. But we were focusing on Obama's massive lead among younger and independent voters. We seem to have missed the huge turnout of older women that apparently [sic] put Clinton over the top.” and

“We expected that Obama would receive the lion's share of independents and drain the Republican primary of these voters. It now appears that, perhaps with a sense that Obama had a lock on the Democratic side, independents felt free to vote on the Republican side and reward their hero, John McCain.” This, as it later transpired, was not true either.

Zogby’s grudging ‘admission’ that something may have been overlooked by his polls is an argument that hasn’t been bought by many serious bloggers.

Brad Friedman of Bradblog says “a few folks in the world are finally beginning to open their eyes, and realize that not counting ballots, and trusting instead, in error-prone, hackable machines for "faith-based results" doesn't make a lot of sense. Particularly in an election for which nobody --- and I mean nobody --- has come up with a legitimate explanation for the surprising results.”

The candidates’ own polls contradicted the electoral “result”. According to Bradblog: “… [On MSNBC] Olbermann repeated what Russert had said earlier, that Obama's internal polls showed him winning by 14%, Clinton's internal polls had Obama winning by 11%.”

Brad and others dedicated and skilled at this sort of analysis have uncovered what appears to account for the curious circumstance of the dog that did not bark.

In New Hampshire 80 percent of the precincts (polling divisions) had their votes counted by Diebold scanning machines, a process which has been thoroughly discredited in the United States. In the one fifth of precincts where votes were counted by hand, the actual results matched the poll predictions. In the Diebold-counted precincts there was a 7 point swing for Clinton. One unreconstructed troublemaker, Dennis Kucinich, also a candidate for the Democratic nomination, is not content to let sleeping Diebolds lie.

In a letter to the Secretary of State for New Hampshire, Kucinich points out that the integrity of the electoral system is at the heart of the democratic process.

Kucinich wrote:”“Ever since the 2000 election – and even before – the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted. This … isn’t about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It’s about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them.”

“This is not about my candidacy or any other individual candidacy. It is about the integrity of the election process.”

“New Hampshire is in the unique position to address – and, if so determined, rectify – these issues before they escalate into a massive, nation-wide suspicion of the process by which Americans elect their President. Based on the controversies surrounding the Presidential elections in 2004 and 2000, New Hampshire is in a prime position to investigate possible irregularities and to issue findings for the benefit of the entire nation.”

Kucinich is alarmed, as are many other Americans, that the Republican party and its military industrial complex of support is well on the way to turning American democracy into the qualitative equivalent of a nineteen thirties Banana republic. In those places democracy was rather like Henry Ford’s cars: “You can have any colour you want, as long as it’s black.”
And, as Henry Ford foresaw, the media saluted, and the band played on.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: sleepy

Entry tags:

commentary

Character is the real issue

John Maxwell

It’s a really good idea to write down for the record, statements you think deserve to be in your book of quotations One such statement, by former Field Marshal Donald Rumsfeld, I did scribble down but have since lost. It went something like this:”I cannot tell you at this moment what is going to happen.” The impression was that in another hour or so, his prophetic talents would be back up to speed and he would then be able to tell the interviewer what would be the result of whatever lunacy he was planning at the time. Or perhaps, the prophecy was a state secret and not for public circulation.

Some people assume that public opinion polls are prophecies. All they can do is describe what a particular group of people intend to do at the time the poll was taken. Unfortunately some people and most of the media believe that polls are the word of God and denounce the pollsters when people don’t behave as they said they would a day or week before.

Freedom to change one’s mind is probably the one significant freedom not under attack by the present US administration. But their accomplices and abettors in the Press are trying to make it harder and harder for people to believe that changing their minds is a sane procedure and not a betrayal of the media’s Right to Know.

Public Opinion polls are merely the societal equivalent of a blood test: if the sample is properly designed, you should get an approximation of what the society thinks at the time the poll was taken. it is nothing more than that. And, to use a brand new cliché – the road to hell is paved with voters’ intentions. Since is is January, and the sinners among us are busy deciding which New Year’s resolutions to break, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that people do enjoy changing their minds – it’s about the only thing they can do without paying tax.

So, after the exhilarating win in Iowa, it probably was no surprise to Barack Obama that he didn’t ‘win’ in New Hampshire, where the demographics, the traditions and the culture are different. I confess that I expected Obama to win based on the trends in the rolling polls done by John Zogby. The problem of course, is that Zogby can’t ask people on election day who they intend to vote for. And, of course, some people make up their minds in the polling booths. And of course, voting machines tend to have minds of their own.

In Iowa, where there is not a primary election but a number of local caucuses, last minute decisions are likely to be less decisive, since the caucusers get to argue with each other about the merits and demerits of each candidate. And there is the possibility of last minute change when candidates whose totals don’t reach a certain level are knocked out and their supporters are free to vote for their next favourite candidate.

Although the press was full of warnings that people shouldn’t take Iowa seriously, because only about 300,00 people caucused, I am inclined to take it more seriously than New Hampshire where emotions ran wilder and spot decisions were easier. And a sample of 300,000 people is a pretty good sample.

The Iowa preferences for Barack Obama are therefore to my mind, more likely to be an accurate reflection of what Americans are thinking right now. This is in my view, confirmed by the fact that majority of those voting in New Hampshire FOR Clinton, also said that they though Obama would be the best candidate fir the Democratic nomination.

Punditry of any kind is dangerous, and long range punditry as practiced by people like me, is even more risky, tending to provoke abusive letters, mainly explaining why I don’t understand American politics and why I have no right to be speaking about something so sacred. I am cheered, however, when I read what I predicted at the time of Mr Bush's selection as president by the US Supreme Court , my prognostications immediately after 9/11 and by my warnings on the Iraq misadventure, before it began. The first one, with a few changes of tense, sounds as if it could have been written last week, predicting as it did Mr Bush’s assaults on the justice system including the Supreme Court and predicting that the world was in for a rough time at the new president’s hands.

As I said at the time, it would be nice if Americans understood how important their choice was to the rest of us. Naturally, in a country so deliberately safeguarded from the truth, most people go for the bread and butter issues and are fertile ground for hysterical appeals to chauvinism and other idiotic prejudices.

Which is why the success of Obama is so surprising. I freely confess that John Edwards was my preferred choice with Obama second. First I knew much more about Edwards and felt, and still feel, that Obama will be forced to give more hostages to fortune than Edwards. Unlike many people I know, I really like and admire Hillary Clinton, but her steadfast commitment to Clintonian politics, including an unswerving belief that Israel is always right, put me off.

It’s not that I believe that Israel is always wrong, it is simply that if the US president is to be an honest broker in the issues of Palestine, he or she must be able to look at both cases impartially. And this becomes particularly important when we remember that the major issue fuelling anti-Americanism and uniting so-called ‘militant Islam’ is Palestine. If the Palestine issues were to be solved, a great deal of generic ‘Islamic militancy’ would disappear. Similarly, the Clintons and their backers continue to believe that the USA must be the policeman of the world and since it can’t do that job well it concentrates on people like the Colombians, the Venezuelans, the Haitians and the Cubans not to speak of the Jamaicans and all of Africa, which are conveniently dismissed from the ranks of the civilised by describing them as failed states or states about to fail.

I once read an economics textbook by Paul Samuelson in which he said that a country can export successfully, only those commodities that satisfy its own market first. In the United States and in most other countries of the world, Freedom is not an exportable surplus.

In the United States they marvel at the success of barack Obama, carefully described as a bi-racial man, rather like Tiger Woods. They cannot be black and be heroes at the same time.

As Senator Joe Biden, a bright, likeable and civilised American Senator said last year "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, ... I mean, that's a storybook, man."

The obvious but unconscious denigration of people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and perhaps even Martin Luther King, escaped Biden. What was reassuring about the new America was how hard people even including the media, came down on Biden for that remark.

The fact that someone like Biden can make a remark like that tells us more than any research study into racial/ethnic/colour attitudes can reveal. In advertisements for eHarmony.com – a service for finding mates, there has never been as far as I know one example of a trans-racial couple, and there is never on television, except sometimes in the news, anything which could suggest that in the United States that are millions of people ‘miscegenating’ like crazy. Despite their problems, this is not true in Britain or Europe. There is still on America’s most potent socialiser, television, a colour bar.

And this is part of what makes Obama’s political odyssey so fascinating.

Bill Clinton has said that the media treats Obama lightly, sparing him the examination it focuses on other candidates. This is true but is largely die to the fact that, like John Kennedy v Nixon half a century ago one candidate has much less controversial baggage than the others. But this is not true of the bloggers and the poison pen experts of the rabid right, who are busy circulating email on the internet accusing Obama of being the ‘Manchurian candidate’ of the militant Muslims and of a host of other high crimes including disrespect for the American pledge of Allegiance.

Not a Candidate but a Movement

The US Press has discovered a surefire way of discrediting the enemies of the right. The Press does not originate most of the scandals, it simply passes them on. The scurrilous and utterly untruthful Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry would have gone nowhere, had it not been taken up and magnified by the Press. On CNN, for example, the video was played over and over. On the other hand, the video which destroyed Howard Dean, showing him apparently to be an hysterical and unbalanced person, was carefully edited and graphically analysed to produce that effect. Dean had to shout in the auditorium in which he was speaking. he was also hoarse. If you subtract the background noise and remove a few of the lower tones, you get an attack weapon of tremendous megatonnage. That too, was amplified by the Press who knew that it was a fabrication.

I’ve had the same treatment. After the 1980 elections in Jamaica there was a huge thing about the fact that I was sweating profusely as the results came in showing the PNP losing. Nobody pointed out what they knew, that the temperature in the studio was well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit because the air conditioners had failed with five times as many people in the studio as the systems were designed to serve; and I was the only person deputed to remain at the commentators’ desk while all the others came and went freely

Dan Rather, the one mainstream journalist who tried to discover the truth about George Bush, had his throat unceremoniously cut by his poison-peddling colleagues and employers.

Journalists have powerful tools and they use them. Talk-show hosts can turn you down and tune you out without your knowing – and so on.

The problem for the US Press is that they can’t turn down or tune out Obama. As someone said last week, Obama is no longer simply a candidate, he’s a movement.

That movement is a direct response to the barbarities of George W> Bush.

It has taken the Americans seven years to get the measure of the disaster that he has been, in lost liberties,lost jobs, lost homes, lost pay rises, lost pensions and investments, and children lost to an unnecessary and unconscionable war.

When he goes, as I predicted seven years ago, he will leave behind him a Supreme Court dedicated to reversing the democratic and social gains of the American people over the last sixty years. Like a lost fish pot, it will go on catching and killing prey long after its owner has disappeared.

People are beginning to understand these things. It is taking them longer to understand what happening to the message and reputation of “America” outside of the Unite∂ States. They don’t know about Cuba and Haiti or all the other crazy misadventures of US power in Latin America, Africa and the Far East. But they do know that there are many people outside the ranks of ‘militant Islam’ who hate, fear or despise the foreign policies of the United States.

Ron Huckabee, no foreign policy wonk, stated in the journal Foreign Affairs recently, that US foreign policy is based on an arrogant, bunker mentality. For this he was roundly criticised by Mitt Romney, the Plastic Man of the republican candidates.

The most interesting thing about the candidate struggle on the republican side is that it reinforces what’s happening on the Democratic side. All of a sudden, character is important and it is the one area that the Press cannot interpose itself between the candidate and the people. That was why John McCain in New Hampshire and Mike Huckabee in Iowa sent Plastic Man packing. That is why Obama won in Iowa and probably won New Hampshire.

This poses immense problems for the media and the Republicans. They are confused at the moment, not knowing who to attack. Believing all along that Hillary was bound to be the democratic nominee they had their toxins all prepared. When Obama won in Iowa, they were thrown into confusion. If Obama is indeed the eventual nominee, which I believe he will be, the republicans will have to fall back on their old standbys, race, sex and poisonous innuendo.

The problem is that Obama does not give them much space. His marriage is obviously happy, his children adore their father, unlike Giuliani’s, and, like McCain and Huckabee, he seems to be a really nice person, a good human being.

Electorates, below the patina of pseudo-sophistication, are always looking for people they can trust. That is why the Press and the republicans went after Al Gore and misrepresented him as an aggrandizing liar who claimed to have invented the Internet and claimed to have been the hero of “Love Story” among other things. Even so, Gore won that election although the Supreme Court decided otherwise.

Kerry also had strong positives going into 2004, but the press and the Swift Boaters turned even his heroism against him as they did against a paraplegic war veteran in the Georgia Senate race. .

If you really want to judge the worth of the US press remember this: In 1997 when the Pope was visiting Fidel Castro in Havana the stage seemed set for an unprecedented Great Debate on the world stage. But then the Drudge report came out with a story about semen stains on a little blue dress and the entire American Press Corps decamped like a flight of cuckoos, to luxuriate in scandal.

There is scandal aplenty surrounding at least one of the republican candidates, Giuliani. But do you think the Press is interested? Despite the fire-fighters he will go on being “America’s Mayor”; despite the concealed expense accounts and the sex scandals he will go on being ‘America’s Mayor’ and he will despite the Bernie Kerik scandals and whatever else might surface between now and November.

Meanwhile, CNN has been busy investigating, showing Barack Obama’s paternal grandmother peeling cassava in her hut miles from nowhere in Kenya and no doubt we will hear serious investigations into his father and stepfather, both black, both dead, and his mother, who was white but is fortunately now dead and impossible to misquote.

A few days ago, George McGovern, about whose character there is no doubt (and which may be why he lost to Nixon,) declared that George Bush had committed higher crimes and greater misdemeanours than Nixon and was more deserving of impeachment. Here was a senior and eminent statesman making serious allegations about the behaviour of the President of the United States

Do you think that made the headlines?

You must be joking.

There was no attempt even to check whether McGovern had a case. The fat lady had already sung as far as the US Press was concerned.

Perhaps though, it simply was not NEWS.

Dual Citizenship

I must confess than I was more than a little surprised –before the elections by the vehemence of Danville Walker’s response to Abe Dabdoub’s cautionary note to the people of West Portland.

Now that it has been revealed that Walker, like Darryl Vaz, is an American citizen, I have been waiting for comment from the Press and the Government. Perhaps I’ve simply missed them. Since Mr Walker’s job description explicitly excludes non-Jamaicans, I cannot see how he can continue to hold it for another minute. The whole affair reeks of undemocratic special privilege demanded by one class of Jamaicans and denied to others.

In the first place the US law does not admit of dual citizenship. Therefore it seems to me that there must be powerful forces which have allowed Vaz and Walker among others, to effectively exercise dual citizenship.

Under American law a citizen can lose his nationality for voting in another country’s elections. Here we have one American citizen presiding over our country’s elections and others running as candidates.

How is that possible?

The American Embassy owes us an explanation and Walker and Vaz owe us – and their American compatriots –their resignations.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: thoughtful

Entry tags:

commentary

Slouching Toward Civilisation

John Maxwell

It was exactly thirty-six years ago this week that the legendary teacher John Searchwell made one of the most profound proposals in Jamaica’s history.

According to Hartley Neita’s ‘This Day in our Past’ in Thursday’s Gleaner, Searchwell called for priority attention to be focused on early education, beginning preferably at age three but not later than four. Searchwell, as I recall the speech, didn’t just call for universal early childhood education; he demanded it; as Neita reports “ not as a concession or by ad hoc arrangements, but as an educational policy, as a human right and as a basic Jamaican philosophy.

The Jamaica Labour Party was then in the throes of an election campaign, at the end of nearly ten years as the first government of independent Jamaica.

Two months after Searchwell spoke the Peoples National Party swept into power by an unprecedented landslide, even more remarkable since the victory was despite some of the most sophisticated gerrymandering of constituencies and the fact that nearly one-third of the electorate was denied the right to vote.

In a short. sharp row with Michael Manley shortly after the PNP victory he told me that this was no time for belt tightening, for an austerity programme; Look, he said, at what the people have given us; it would be ingratitude to ask them to sacrifice at this time.

Despite that, Manley and the PNP did have to practice some belt tightening and they did, against the odds, make some steps towards implementing a comprehensive reform of education, including making it free. But the hectoring of wise and thoughtful columnists condemning distributive politics, the machinations of the new leader of the JLP, Edward Seaga, and the stringencies of the IMF put paid to all those bright ideas.

The PNP tried. Douglas Manley, Professor of Education at the UWI was pulled away from his job and other eminent educators, Fay Saunders, Searchwell’s immediate predecessor as head if the Jamaica teachers’ Association (the teachers’ union) Errol Miller himself destined to become UWI professor of Education and Phyllis McPherson Russell were just a few of the dedicated specialists drafted into the effort.

Murder and Education

The Jamaican murder rate, under 70 annually in 1962, had risen to more than 400 by 1872, and except for a brief levelling off in the 80s, has continued out of control until now.

I myself got into the act, proposing an amnesty for the return of firearms and later, at Public Eye, campaigning for the disarming of the entire society and the reform of the police force into a socially responsible community service organisation and away from its (then) developing counter-insurgency role in which it remained foreign to its clients, only ‘parachuting’ into the ghetto to put disaffected youth in their proper place – May Pen cemetery.

The counter-insurgency role was magnified by the fear, which enveloped the society as political propagandists spoke of a Cuban invasion while encouraging intervention by the CIA. The Gun Court and the Suppression of Crimes Act and even the State of Emergency were welcomed by the populace (according to the Stone polls) and, of course, did not work

Three decades ago we refused to acknowledge what the problem really was. We were told that the answer was not populist distributive politics, it was “Wealth creation”. It was, however, never explained how wealth was to be created if we were unable to put people to work and we could not put people to work when most of the land is idle and the largest section of the labour force consists of domestic helpers.

John Searchwell knew part of the answer. Education would put the intellectual power of the people at their own service. The World Bank knows it too. In report after report the Bank has told our leaders that education alone could significantly raise the GDP and reduce the crime rate.

There is an enormous amount of information on education in the Caribbean and lots of it is about Jamaica. Here is a quote from a World Bank document titled ‘Secondary education in the Caribbean’.

“EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY

In addition to reducing poverty and boosting economic growth, education also creates opportunities for a better life, thus reducing inequalities in society.
Children with access to a quality primary education gain the basic literacy skills and cognitive abilities for personal advancement that will put them in a position to move on to secondary and higher education, develop their local economies and forge advantageous links with the outside world.

EDUCATION AND HEALTH

As the gap between rich and poor in LAC countries continues to grow wider, bringing the benefits of education to the most disadvantaged children becomes progressively more difficult. Children from extremely poor families are at a disadvantage from the start, and rapidly fall further behind. Often undernourished, they are prone to develop more slowly.

Many of the region's poorest children come to school ill, hungry and thus unprepared for learning. Education cannot be effective if children in the region do not have access to adequate health care, good nutrition and live in a stable home environment.” (http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/LACEXT/EXTLACREGTOPED... -)

We know all this. The World Bank doesn't have to tell us! We’ve known it for a long time.

So why do we avoid tackling the problem? Why is it that we do not have a unified political programme to give some measure of justice to our young?

One reason is simple. We are, no matter how civilised we think we are, subject to some of the most atavistic responses from our ‘reptile brain’ the most ancient part of the human brain and the most primitive. Some people live their entire lives in there; the fundamentalists who urge an eye for an eye are growing in number and influence. As I write on Thursday morning I have just read an open letter on the internet from a young Jamaican woman who asks why we are not disturbed, angry or take action when we hear that three men described as goat thieves were butchered in St Elizabeth.

That question reminded me of an editorial I wrote in Public Opinion in 1964 when irate farmers slaughtered three presumed goat thieves in Padmore, St Andrew. The police paid no attention. Why should they have? The society thought it was a good idea.

That was 44 years ago. Since then I no longer leave my front door unlocked for months at a time. Since then the cage built round his house by one of Jamaica’s millionaires in Jacks Hill has been tastefully concealed by bougainvillea. Since then we have been busy building gated communities right next door to the ghettoes. And if that doesn’t pacify our dreads some of us can always escape to the biggest gated community of All – Cayman.

But, as members of Alcoholics Anonymous know, you cannot escape your disease by moving away. And as AA says, most of us are unprepared to deal with our disease until we hit absolute, abject bottom, when you have lost everything you cherish, all that means anything to you. Some manage to escape before they reach the pits, but most don’t. And, most who don’t – die.

Some of us have a death wish. We are always ready to up the ante, as they say in the casinos. One letter writer to the Gleaner in December attempted to provide a final solution to the crime problem.

I won’t attempt to paraphrase his effusions. Here is a sample:

“The garrisons, by and large, occupy prime real estate in Kingston and St. Andrew, St. Catherine and HYPERLINK "http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20071221/letters/letters1.html#". They are primarily the political enclaves of powerful parliamentarians and therein lies our problem of dismantling these albatrosses around our necks.

A solution has to be found to deal with this monster and I am, therefore, proposing that we immediately, and as a beginning, set about to remove and separate the people from the western belt of the city and scatter them across the length and breadth of Jamaica, provide jobs and housing for them and, by all means necessary, prevent them from forming themselves into any group or realigning with their former neighbours. The houses and most other structures should then be blown up and we can then open up the areas and build huge shopping malls and other high-income-generating complexes.”

This was the ‘Letter of the Day’ in the Gleaner.

In another ‘Letter of the Day’, this time on Wednesday this week, the same writer suggests that every law-abiding citizen should be allowed to purchase a firearm.

“It is very ironic that the outlaws and criminals can gain such easy access to guns, while the decent citizens are left to the mercy of those hoodlums and the state's bureaucracy from owning firearms.

No laws have stopped the criminals from getting guns into the country and nothing has stopped them from using them illegally to maim or kill thousands of our citizens.”

These statements are recipes for civil war.

The only law-abiding citizens who could purchase firearms are those – a small minority – who are not challenged to find food and money for school fees and clothing.

When we can publish this sort of juvenile gibberish as ideas to which we should pay attention, something is very wrong with our society.

The urgent question is: how many of us believe what this person believes. I suspect that there are more than many of us suspect.

Barack Obama

“They said this day would never come” he said.

But there were enough people who believed in Barack Obama’s dream and message of hope to turn the conventional wisdom on its head and to confound people like me who dodn’t think it could be done.

Reading abiout the campaign from thousand miles away and watching the posturing of television experts was never the best way to prognosticate the results of any political process, especially one which now seems so dependent on the chemistry between a leader and his followers.

My editor has graciously allowed me to change my column after deadline which allows me to briefly point out some significant facts.

Barack Obama beat Hilary Clinton among women voters 35 t0 30 percent; among registered Democrats 32:21 %; among Independents 44:17%; among crossover Republicans 41:10; among working class and poor people 37:30; among rich people 41:19%

As Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone says “Most astounding however, he beat her among her core supporters, women, by five points. What more can I say than — in a night of mind boggling statistics — that that’s the stat of the night.

A black man did this. In a state that’s 96 percent white. This is truly a historic night in America.”

I didn’t believe it was possible, and that is probably because facts alone can’t give the texture of a leader’s appeal to his people.Some things have got to be felt, smelled and tasted. Clearly the people of Iowa, 94% white, smelled, felt and tasted the hope for a new and better world that Obama symbolised.

And on the Republican side I believe the world should be thankful that Plastic Man, Mitt Romney, had his breakfast eaten by the rank and impoverished outsider, Mike Huckabee.

It may not be morning in America just yet, but the rest of the world glimpses the bright streaks of a new day.

Aspirins for Cancer

Just over a hundred years ago the celebrated African-American writer, W.E.B. du Bois wrote that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the colour line.

It is also the problem of the twenty-first.

Researchers in several studies have found that black males, or images of them, are likely to cause some level of alarm in most Americans, including other black males. And, as TIME magazine has told us, heroes shouldn’t really be black, which is why O.J.Simpson was portrayed as much darker than he was in order to put him in his proper perspective.

This week another study disclosed that dark-skinned people including Hispanics are less likely than whites to be properly treated in emergency rooms of hospitals. They are less likely than like skinned people to get the more powerful painkillers they appeared to deserve. They don’t get the heavy-duty drugs, which would ease their suffering, because of the fear that they may be presenting themselves for a ‘FIX’!

This prejudice seems to apply to black doctors as well as to whites, and mirrors the research on fear I mentioned earlier.

In a country which began by defining one fifth of its citizenry as only three-fights human, such progress should perhaps be welcomed.

But the problem is not really ‘racial’ or ethnic. Queen Victoria, just over a century ago, was astonished that labourers in England could have such white skin. She thought they were all black.

So, when the world decides to deal with a problem involving black people one should be conscious that the European prejudices have long ago been absorbed by most of us. In dealing with Haiti, for example, do you really expect that a President Romney – any more than George Bush – would believe that the people there are entirely human?

Remember the whole panoply of myth and lies spun about Haiti from the beginning, when Haiti was first a political bogeyman, because it threatened the hegemony of France and the slave industry of the United States. It was only later that the myth transformed it into a haven for savages.

If we are considering the state of the world it may be useful to remember how far we have come and more important, how far we still have to go.

jankunnu@gmail.com-

Entry tags:

commentary

Christmas in Hell

John Maxwell

Christmas in Jamaica is bad enough. One good thing about Christmas Day is that it means the end of weeks of aural assaults by mindless rhymesters perverting songs of worship to paeans of praise for hucksters of all kinds, from shopkeepers to banks, from autoparts dealers to purveyors of cheap, non-returnable, eminently breakable, non-biodegradable trash tricked out in plastic, tinsel and lead paint to lure innocent children and entrap their parents. And, as a bonus, there are the sound-system parties, which allow you to dance in your own home to music played two miles away.

An Alternative Scenario

If you think this is bad, consider another scenario.

Consider that you are a citizen of another land, one steeped in history – a history of resistance to oppression, a history which includes the first proclamation on Earth that all people were equal, including women and children.

This land, which for convenience we'll call Ayiti, was introduced to Christianity by a bunch of marauding savages bearing swords and caparisoned in the fierce colours of their leader, a Genoese adventurer named Cristobal Colon, aka Christopher Columbus. This character had induced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, the monarchs of two Spanish kingdoms –Aragon and Castile – to bet their farms on the discovery of a new route to China, then as now, the fabulous land of magical herbs, spices and other goods which would make life bearable for the inhabitants of Europe, just emerging from the Dark Ages.

Our hero had managed to convince Ferdinand and Isabella on the basis of a map obtained from an African who claimed to know the way to China aka Cipangu. If the Spanish got to Cipangu before their European cousins, great wealth and power would be theirs; all the tea in China would be theirs for the asking, in addition to carpets, silks and luxuries only dreamt of in Europe.

When Columbus' "doom burdened caravels" hove to in Ayiti, the million or so people who welcomed him could never have guessed that they would soon be history. Within thirty years the populations of the West Indies had been so reduced that in the four larger islands now re-christened the Greater Antilles) less than a thousand remained alive in 1519. This is according to the testimony of Bartolomeo de las Casas, a Spanish monk who came with the conquistadors and was an eyewitness to the Conquest. Another historian, Gonzalo Oviedo, estimated that of the one million Indians on Ayiti when the Spaniards arrived, less than five hundred remained half a century later– the "natives and … the progeny and lineage " of those who first occupied the land.

‘They died in heaps, like bedbugs …’

In the Caribbean and in Mexico, Peru and Colombia smallpox and other diseases introduced by the Spaniards killed the 'Indians' by the million. Relatively small Spanish expeditions were able to conquer huge empires because the native populations were swept away by diseases to which they had never been exposed and for which they had no immunity.

Toribio Motolina, another Spanish priest, wrote that in most provinces in Mexico "more than one half the population died; in others the proportion was a little less; they died in heaps, like bedbugs."

More than a hundred years after Motolina, a German missionary writing in 1699, said the so-called Indians "die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost."

The destruction of the 'American Indian' populations and cultures has meant an incalculable loss to human ethnic and cultural diversity. It was they who gave us words like barbecue, canoe, hammock and hurricane and crops like corn, potatoes, cassava and tomatoes. The people of ancient Egypt, the pyramid builders seem very far away in time; the Olmecs, Maya, Aztecs, and Incas, who also built pyramids and played games very much like basketball, soccer and Jai alai, seem much closer.

To Jamaicans and people of the Caribbean, the sense of loss is almost palpable in relation to the lost civilisations of Africa, destroyed by the slave trade, which, like globalisation, set brother against brother, tribe against tribe and nation against nation.

Africa was targeted because the Europeans knew that their own people could not survive for long in the hot, humid, mosquito-ridden Indies and that sugar, replacing gold, as the commodity most likely to make men rich, was too hard a work for them.

Turning to Africa meant the devastation of many ancient civilisations – many disappearing almost without trace, further impoverishing mankind's cultural diversity and robbing Africa of the populations and skills it needed for its own development.

Although the Europeans found large quantities of gold, silver and copper in the "New World’, gold was never as lucrative as sugar and the cotton and rubber extracted from the plantations of the Americas. And nothing was as lucrative as the slave trade

As Sybille Fischer remarks in her book Modernity Disavowed: “Colonialism in the Caribbean had produced societies where brutality combined with licentiousness in ways unknown in Europe. The sugar plantations in the new World were expanding rapidly and had an apparently limitless hunger for slaves.”

'A wretch like me!'

One of the modern Jamaicans' favourite hymns at funerals is 'Amazing Grace' penned by a slave trader after he retired from the trade, rich and comfortable. It was his way of atoning for his crimes, and perhaps, of saying thanks to God.

Nothing can atone for the misery and degradation imposed on the 25 million or more people transported into slavery or the millions more slaughtered when they fought to avoid capture. Nothing can atone for five hundred years of racist victimisation, nor the five hundred years of brutality and dangerous behaviours, beaten, inculcated and burned into the psyches of the enslaved and their descendants.

The inhabitants of Ayiti, now almost all African, like the people of all the enslaved islands and lands of the Americas, were engaged in an unending struggle to destroy slavery. In Surinam, in Barbados, and Grenada in the United States of America, in Nicaragua and in the Caribbean the slaves rose time after time to break their chains. In Jamaica they had some success. The Maroons fought the much better armed British to a standstill and wrested from them a treaty of non-aggression and non-interference in 1739. It was a treaty soon broken by the British.

Desperation and the will to be free fuelled the Tacky rebellion of 1760. This rebellion dwarfed the Maroon Wars and was an islandwide conspiracy, which lasted six months. The aims of the leaders included driving out the white population, and partitioning Jamaica into principalities in the tradition of the Akan-speaking Koromanti who were at the heart of the rebellion. One of them, a man called Bouckman, fled to Ayiti when the rebellion was finally crushed.

There, in Ayiti, he ignited a struggle for freedom, which ended with the expulsion of the last foreign soldiers from Ayisien soil.

In 1804, after ten years of warfare, the rebel slaves and their free allies defeated the armies of Napoleon (twice), and of Britain and Spain. Dessalines declared Ayiti independent and free and declared the country a refuge from slavery anywhere.

He also pronounced the first known declaration of universal human rights, giving legal equality to all human beings, men, women and children.

It was a hundred and forty four years later, in 1948 that the world caught up with Ayiti in producing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Next December 10, almost exactly a year from now, the world will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nation's proclamation of the Universal Declaration.

The preamble to the Declaration is not very well known. It goes like this:

" Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts, which have outraged the conscience of mankind;

And the advent of a world, in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

"Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction."

The declaration then proceeds to list the basic principles of the declaration beginning with Article 1.which says that

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

And it continues to explain in Article 2 that

“ Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty”.

The declaration is intended to be universal, as was Dessalines’ declaration in 1804. Unfortunately for us there are billions of people in this world including many in this country, who do not enjoy all the benefits of this universal declaration. But some are much worse off than others. Among those are the people of Iraq, of Palestine and right next door to us, the people of Ayiti, that imaginary place where slavery was abolished by the slaves themselves.

In Ayiti, aka Haiti, these rights and the Universal Declaration do not apply.

Rather like the captured Islamists in neighbouring Guantanamo Bay, a little to their northwest, the Haitians all 8 million of them, live in a concentration camp. The Haitian version is designed to stifle their freedoms and liberties and engineered to prevent them from being led by leaders of their own choice.

Nearly four years after US Marine were landed there for the third time in a hundred years, the freely elected president of Ayiti is an exile in South Africa. He was kidnapped from the presidential palace by US Marines led by the US Ambassador to Haiti and transported, as "cargo" with his family to the Central African Republic – the American idea of hell on earth. From there he was rescued in a mission led by the black US congresswoman Maxine Waters and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson. They chartered a plane and headed off to the Central African Republic themselves to bring President Aristide and his wife Mildred and their two daughters back to the Caribbean. It took them hours of negotiating with the country’s dictator to get him to release the Aristides.

President Aristide came to Jamaica where the government felt constrained by tradition and popular sentiment, to welcome him, but found itself unable to resist US pressure to get him out of the Caribbean.

Aristide's sin was to want to fulfill the mission of his ancestors, to build a paradise on the dungheap left behind by Haiti’s colonisers and exploiters.

Nearly four years later a Haitian president is in office but Aristide's and his people’s enemies are in power.

The country is ruled by the US Ambassador, and is policed by a so-called United Nations force – MINUSTAH whose second commander, a Brazilian General killed himself after a friendly chat with leaders of the Haitian elite.

MINUSTAH’s only distinctions are killing a large number of women and children in their pursuit of so-called bandits who seem to be mainly pro-Aristide youth, and the rape and other sexual abuse of young Haitian children, some as young as ten.

A Dread of Black Freedom

From the earliest days as an independent nation the Americans have feared and dreaded Haiti. As an asylum for escaped slaves, it threatened the slave system in the American south. And after France extorted billions of dollars in gold from Haiti in 'compensation' for the loss of capital (slaves) and land, in Haiti, the US lent money to the Haitians to pay the debt and ruined them with the interest.

As I have said before: while arms never subdued Haiti, it was defeated by the power of financiers in a sinister preview of the modern tactics of the IMF and the World Bank.

Despite all the harassment, the 10,000 murders of activists and leaders, the Haitian people, united in the Fanmi Lavalas, have continued to support their leaders and their culture. A few months ago one of their leaders, Dr. Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, was kidnapped after a meeting with some Americans. He has not been heard from since. A few weeks later another leader, Dr Marlyse Narcisse, was kidnapped but released when there was a tremendous howl of Haitian and international outrage that apparently embarrassed the powers that rule Haiti.

And so the Haitians survive, without rights, at the mercy of a United Nations corrupted and intimidated by the power of the United States, Canada and France acting in concert.

The United States, Canada, France and Haiti all signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

They all agreed that “… disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts, which have outraged the conscience of mankind and they promised to make the world a more civilized place.

The spectacle of these three self-styled democracies combining to crush the rights and hopes of 8 million poor people is obscene, but perhaps not as revolting as the fact that Haiti's relatives and friends in the Caribbean, Jamaica and the others, but especially Jamaica, can sit and watch the Haitians’ sojourn in Hell as if they were watching a Disney fantasia or a Christmas Pantomime.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: thoughtful

Entry tags:

commentary

A Licence for Malingerers

John Maxwell

The Man from Ham Walk

Jacob Taylor was a short, thick man with the face of an amiable pugilist, the sort of guy children immediately adopt as a sort of honorary uncle. He was the epitome of the Jamaican civil servant, a man who did his job diligently, without hope of recognition, without fear, favour or any interest except that of the public he served.

I first met him in the newly established office of the Beach Control Authority ( BCA) on Beechwood Avenue, just about opposite to the present headquarters of the Jamaica Observer. I was the first reporter to check out the newly established BCA, I went to interview the Secretary and Chairman of the Authority. Unfortunately the Chairman, Mr H.D Tucker, was not there but I spoke to the secretary, Mr Dujon and I met a lifelong friend in Jacob Taylor, then his assistant. He was proud of the fact that he was born in Ham Walk, near Linstead and without doubt its most notable citizen.

For the next forty years Jacob was to devote himself to securing rights of access to Jamaican beaches for the Jamaican people. Some beaches were easy – nobody was interested in building hotels on them. One such was the Winniefred Rest Home beach at Fairy Hill in Portland. That was then.

Other beaches had to be fought for. Jacob was the unassuming general in a guerilla war against private interests that had recently heard about the attractions of beaches for tourists and were trying to incorporate them into their estates as quickly and as ruthlessly as possible.

Most of Jamaica’s beaches had until then been of no interest to landowners. Ordinary people beached their fishing boats or went for dips in the sparkling waters when they chose – often innocent of clothing. My father, a Baptist parson, often baptized people at Derby beach, now Silver Sands. In the early 1950s it suddenly became clear that beaches were desirable properties.

Within a few weeks of taking up his job Jacob could probably have recited by heart the Beach Control Act, Law 56 of 1955,. He was to become the very personification of justice for thousands of Jamaicans, fishermen and others whose free and easy access to the sea was now threatened by people hoping to make fortunes from tourism.

Jacob took the law seriously, and when he became Secretary of the BCA, aggressively defended the prescriptive rights of poor people to the beaches despite expensive legal challenges from such as Teddy Pratt of Mammee Bay and Lady Price of San San. Laughing Water is a public beach reserve, according to the law but not according to the powers that be.

What Jacob could not prevent, was the wholesale annexation of north coast beaches facilitated by the government of Sir Alexander Bustamante. The first government of independent Jamaica pushed people off the beaches by the simple expedient of relocating the highway which had until then, run along the coast. The relocation removed the sea views as well as the access to the beaches. Prospect Beach (‘Reggae beach’), Llandovery and San San were among the more egregious examples. At San San, before the road was moved, the aptly named Coldhardour Ltd, promoters of the development, put a fence in the sea beside the road, as I reported in Public Opinion forty years ago. The so-called car park at San San is in fact, the remains of the public highway and a monument to land capture by the rich.

In the seventies Jacob renewed his efforts to secure the beaches, introducing training, examination and certification for lifeguards, and building changing rooms and toilets.

By the time he retired in 1995, he had ensured that of Jamaica’s 488 miles of coastline, there were 20 miles of public beach to balance the 20 miles of privately licensed beach.

Since then a new breed of public official has emerged, particularly in the UDC – an entity that I describe as the Ultimate Devastation Conglomerate. Another disaster is the new National Environmental Protection Authority – NEPA – which some environmentalists describe as Never Ever Protect Anything.

Jacob’s legacy is being destroyed by the erosion of the public’s rights to the beaches. The UDC fought strenuously to take away the Hellshire beach from the fishermen – claiming to own the beach when the fishermen did – and bulldozing the houses of the fishermen calling them squatters.. They have also in my view, cheated the fishermen of their inheritance by restricting them to a smaller than agreed area and by continual harassment which makes cooperative development of the beach impossible. The UDC wants the beach for an upscale exclusive private development.

NEPA, which in Jacob’s day was the NRCA, was asked to do its public duty to protect the public interest in the prescriptive rights of access to Winniefred beach. They appeared to agree and then, without notice to the people who petitioned them, withdrew from the case without warning or giving any reason.

Beaches and open space are essential for the leisure and recreation of the people. Those who would deny the people their rights are putting a rod in pickle for themselves. Hellshire and Winniefred Beach in Portland are two of the last remaining public recreational areas in Jamaica. – areas where people can bathe without danger.

Ninety Days to Perdition

The government's headlong pursuit of the Great Development Myth is going to land all of us in serious trouble before we are much older.

Tourism is seen as the magic bullet for "Development" and this means destroying the environment of Jamaica and taking away public rights in order to build cruise ship piers and exclusive resorts for foreigners.

The energy crisis, global warming and the coming worldwide depression will soon put paid to all the dreams of cruise ship heaven and artificial attractions.. Our frenzied pursuit of tourist-factory-farming will bequeath to us expensive white elephants in the shape of hotels on beaches ravaged by super hurricanes, cruise ship piers without cruise ships and a population having to pay for expensive 'developments' which are unable to pay for themselves.

The government, in an effort to cut through red tape and speed up 'development' is proposing to institute a mandatory 90-day turnaround time for approval of new projects by NEPA.

This will not even allow time for an effective Environmental Impact Assessment. It seems that developers are constitutionally unable to give adequate notice of their projects although most of these projects have been months and years in conception. They wait till the last minute and blackmail civil servants by claiming massive loss of profit if permission is not granted immediately.

The Jamaica Environmental Action Network (JEAN) – of which I am proud to be a member – has taken objection to this proposal on the ground that the new rules will open the development process to anarchy.

JEAN is concerned by two things: one is the inability of the NEPA to make up its mind and to make effective rules for developers and the other is the fact that when NEPA does make rules it takes no action when these rules are defied, ignored, or broken.

One example, supplied by JEAN will explain the point;

"… the environmental permit granted by NEPA to Hoteles Pinero Jamaica Ltd. (HOJAPI) to build the Gran Bahia Principe Hotel requires that :- (a) the sewage treatment plant (STP) be built in accordance with submitted designs; (b) the Ministry of Health be advised before commencement of construction of the STP, at 50% completion, at 90% completion and on commissioning; and (c) that the effluent from the plant must confirm to NEPA standards. What in fact happened? The sewage plant was not built according to the specifications, we are unaware whether or not the Ministry of Health has ever issued an approval letter for the "as built" plant, only one notification was done at 50% construction, and following tests … the effluent was not in conformance with standards. None of the three government agencies that could apply sanctions to the hotel – NEPA, the Ministry of Health and/or the Water Resources Authority – has done so."

If NEPA wants to 'speed up the process of development approval" the simplest option is simply to do nothing. That is, simply follow their Standard Operating Procedure.

Theoretically, new mining operations require an Environmental Impact Assessment. As far as I know NEPA has never asked for any, and one result is the new mining pit which will destroy part of the Spur Tree Hill Road out of Mandeville (see photograph) The people of Mandeville were never given the opportunity of deciding whether they wanted their landscape disfigured and their road destroyed. They are allowed to watch it happening, without the intervention of NEPA or any other government authority.

NEPA's demonstrated preference is for what Jacob Taylor described to me years ago as the ultimate deterrent to action by civil servant: "Masterly Inactivity" – a process made into an art form by NEPA. The procedure is simple: documents are simply passed from one functionary to another, each declining responsibility, until one day the file ends up on the floor of some secure vault, an archive of blasted hope and frustrated initiative. Under the new rules, this is the way forward.

I believe that the Prime Minister and his Minister of Health and Environment should meet urgently with members of the environmental and public interest lobby. If we Jamaicans do not understand the rules and procedures of sustainable development we will find ourselves in a political and economic backwater, drifting aimlessly in a sea of pollution, erosion and despair. The environmental lobby is not against development, it is simply opposed to unsustainable, destructive and expensive “Development”.

There are numberless examples of the perils of uncontrolled, unmonitored and unregulated development, from Times Beach and the Love Canal, to Minimata and the poisoned rivers and flattened forests of Amazonia.

All of those disasters happened in places with lots more land space than ours, yet their effects have been horrendous. Our small size means that our mistakes will be magnified. The sewage from the houses at San San will eventually destroy the swimming there. The sewage in the sea at Bahia Principe (see photo) will poison not only those to the windward – the people of Pear Tree Bottom – but everyone beyond. The sewage from Portmore and Kingston Harbour is now being exported to Hellshire and points west. Fertiliser from sugar estates and sewage from hotels is ending up on Negril’s corals and beaches.

Jamaica is a small place and we cannot afford to make even small mistakes. The world is a small place and every mistake we make is added to every other mistake made by everyone else.

That's why the Arctic icecap is melting and the beaches are disappearing at Negril.

We have only one Earth, one Jamaica. And we have one duty, not to leave the world a worse place than we found it and in fact, to make it better for those who follow us.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Entry tags:

commentary

The Truth and the Public Interest

On Thursday a veritable galaxy of media powers and stars assembled at the University of the West Indies for a seminar to discuss the liberalization of the libel laws of Jamaica. The Media Association of Jamaica in association with the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica and the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce sponsored the occasion. The Jamaica Press Association was also represented.

The seminar was proposed to ”produce a body of relevant knowledge regarding the practical implications of the current laws and practices as they apply to local and regional media” according to a handout issued by the organizers.

Since there was no one representing the ordinary people of Jamaica I took the liberty of speaking on their behalf – a liberty which the Press and the Media take every day without any serious consideration of what such a presumption really entails.

Over the last few years, against the background of punitive libel damages awarded against certain elements of the media, there has been a growing concern among media owners that libel damages could actually put some of them out of business, and that such damages are a threat to freedom of the Press.

The remedies proposed include a liberalizing of the laws and practices governing Defamation. Among these is a proposal to extend the range of privilege, to allow news organisations to publish as fact, statements made in public by almost any politician about any other politician or public servant. There are other proposals including one to extend the ability of the press to defame public officials in line with the doctrine enunciated by the US Supreme Court in the 1964 case of Sullivan v the New York Times.

This doctrine, based on the First Amendment to the US constitution, basically allows anyone to say with impunity anything about any ‘public official’ acting in his public capacity. The only exceptions are if the plaintiff can prove that the statements were made with express malice or with a reckless disregard for the truth of the statement.

Unless the plaintiff is a mind reader, it would seem to me impossible to prove a libel given these constraints. How does one discover a ‘reckless disregard’ in the mind of the journalist?

We speak grandly of the Press as a Public trust, but I wonder whether we understand the meaning of that claim.

For some others, and me the function of journalism is a duty undertaken in the public interest

We assume the duty to provide the public with information, which is as accurate as we can make it.

We assume the duty to provide Public Information, which is not spun, skewed, twisted, biased, or prejudicial in any way to the public interest.

As part of that public trust, we have tacitly undertaken to ensure that the people are entitled to know the source of the information we deliver and we should be able to guarantee that our sources are as clean and pure as the sources of the water we drink.

Public information is as essential as water, because people cannot make up their minds or protect their best interest if they are not aware of the opportunities as well as the pitfalls and snares in their paths.

The Public Interest demands that we report the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but The Truth. Our opinions must be labeled as Opinion and not disguised as fact. We need to respect the reality that a fact is a statement that is independently verifiable.

We take it for granted that Freedom of Expression is a basic Human Right – that it means the right speak one's mind freely, to communicate freely, to publish and share information without restraint, except the restraints necessary in the protection of the Public Interest.

The Public Interest mandates the protection of individual private rights in the context of the general public right to safety, environmental health, economic security, privacy and protection from harassment from any quarter.

In defining our rights we must understand that our human rights belong to all of us, that no one has any superior or different or sectoral rights as against anyone else and that all of us are entitled to equal protection under the law and the Jamaican constitution.

Truth is an absolute Defence

We have been informed that the law as it currently stands – including the statutes and the precedents – exercises a chilling effect on freedom of speech, that it interferes with fair comment and that it restrains the practice of investigative journalism.

As a journalist of 55 years experience, I would be more impressed were I presented with any evidence that our Press and Media are really interested in investigative journalism or evidence of the chilling effect on such enterprises.

For instance I have not been able to understand why it has taken more than two years for our press to become interested in the business of Cash Plus, a monstrosity that threatens to undermine the very fabric of public confidence in our financial institutions.

I cannot understand why a catastrophic appointment at the National Gallery has not attracted the interest of the Press although the affair threatens to destroy the National Gallery itself. I cannot understand why the Press ignores the UDC's beach stealing campaign or why it pays no attention to the destruction wreaked on our sea defences, our national airport and our roads and bridges by unrestrained sand mining.

I cannot understand why there has been so little attention paid to the business of drug trafficking and to the collateral damage it is wreaking in our communities.

In a more general perspective, I cannot understand why it has been impossible for our Press and media to explain the real state of the poor and the communities in which they suffer and to explain why force cannot cure our crime problem.

I cannot understand why there is usually no attempt to discover the real reason some policemen are being murdered. Or why, people collaterally connected to news organisations are immune from public criticism in most of the news media.

There are many other things I cannot understand, especially since the Truth is an absolute defence to a charge of libel.

This is an important thing to remember: The truth is an absolute defence to a charge of libel, except in some rare and peculiar ciorcumstances relating to criminal libel.

Since I speak as a journalist, I share the responsibility for these lapses, but how much greater is the responsibility of those who hire journalists and can direct them to look into whatever seems suspicious or inexplicable?

It is my opinion that we are failing in our duty to the Public Interest and that while the libel laws may need revision; the push for reform is less necessary for investigative journalism than it is to disguise the fact of our failure to perform. The cure may be worse than the disease.

It is a fact that for most people a good reputation is their only capital asset.

If their good reputation is lost or damaged, they are in danger of being smeared and disadvantaged for as long as they live. Mud sticks. The media has recently embarked on the publication of gossip and rumour to the detriment of various oerson’s reputations. Unfortunately for them, this gossip is couched in such terms that to challenge its veracity will only expose the plaintiff to more obloquy.

As it is, the media now gets away with major transgressions against the public interest while neglecting its primary responsibilities to that interest.

To expand the libel laws in the directions proposed will simply give the owners of the Press the privilege to destroy their enemies at will, and particularly to destroy the representatives of the poor in their public functions.

If the libel laws are to be revised there must be a revision of the time needed to defend one's character. Today, the damage seeps throughout the society and reaches all parts in the years it takes to bring an action.

The other side of the equation is that some publishers and journalists are intimidated by the mere threat of a writ by people who have no real interest in pursuing a cause they themselves know is without merit. This is a serious abuse of the law, but no one seems to care. The worthless writ hangs on, like an abandoned fish-pot, catching and killing initiative and subverting courage. If these two faults were corrected we would have achieved much more than is possible by extending the Sullivan doctrine to this country.

The Press needs to remember that public officials are human beings with feelings and families. Above all, they should remember the case of Richard Jewell a security guard at the Atlanta Olympics who was suspected of planting the bomb he reported finding. After several years the FBI cleared his name, absolving him absolutely of any connection with the bomb. In the interim his life was made miserable by the Press who decided that since he was a suspect, the only one for some time, he must be guilty. After years of the most hostile attention and physical harassment he was cleared, and decided to sue his tormentors for libel.

The Press’ first line of defence was that since Jewel was a public official and a person in the news – where they put him) – he could not sue because of the Sullivan doctrine. The courts dismissed this wickedness, but Jewell’s mental and physical health had so deteriorated that he died soon after, a victim of Press Freedom as understood in the United States. The gravamen of the Press’ case was that since their false and malicious publicity had made Jewell a public figure, he was unable to sue by virtue of the Sullivan doctrine.

As the sans culottes sang in 1789, Privilege for ALL or Privilege for NONE. Freedom is indivisible – a slogan we all parrot, many of us without understanding the meaning.

We cannot give the Press and Media rights not enjoyed by the rest of us. Nor can we impose peculiar disabilities on certain groups or classes of people. If we are going to expose politicians to the slings and arrows of outrageous talk show hosts and other pettifoggers, shouldn’t the press and media barons and practitioners by the same reasoning, be subject to the same disabilities?

I speak with some feeling, since I am the only journalist who has been successfully sued for libel by a newspaper for telling the truth, but who was compromised by a manager who knew nothing about libel. I am also the only Jamaican journalist to have been threatened in Parliament with imprisonment by a government upset by my opinions. I am also the only editor whose newspaper was officially blacklisted by order of the Financial Secretary of Jamaica.

And in that time I stood alone, unsupported by many of the very same people now protesting about Freedom of the Press

Protecting our patrimony

Last Sunday I was among several dozen people, from Portland and from Kingston and other places, who attended a meeting at Fairy Hill, near Port Antonio, to form an organisation for the protection of Jamaica’s public beaches. The casus belli, so to speak, was the threat by the Ultimate Devastation Conglomerate to capture the Fairy Hill Beach at the Winniefred Rest Home and to convert it into an upscale resort for foreigners, destroying the environment and depriving the people of Jamaica of one of their best and last remaining public beaches.

The movement was sparked by Cynthia Miller, a vendor on the beach, and Carla Gulotta, an Italian born woman who has owned a guesthouse at Drapers, San San, for the past 18 years. We heard testimony from the people whose livelihoods depend on the beach which they have used and husbanded for more than 50 years, and to which they have prescriptive rights.

The UDC, however, claims that it has acquired the beach from the government in a peculiar transaction which appears to have bypassed the nominal owners of the beach and the land, the Winniefred Rest Home Trust, a charity set up nearly 90 years ago.

The Winniefred beach Defence Committee (WBDC) intends to ask for a declaration by the courts recognizing their indefeasible rights to the beach and to access to the beach by virtue of the beach Control Act and the declaration of the Beach as a public Beach fifty years ago.

This action was initiated by a number of people from the area, but people like me, who have used the beach freely for up to fifty years, are to join them in the suit.

Originally, the petitioners had asked and got the support of the Beach Control Authority (BCA) – part of NRCA/NEPA – to assert their rights and the rights of the general public. The BCA however withdrew from the suit without giving the petitioners any notice of their intention, apparently believing that their withdrawal would allow the UDC greater leverage in the attempt to capture the beach.

This issue is an important beachhead in the campaign to defend the public right to public property all over Jamaica against the campaign by the UDC to steal beach property and for to private entrepreneurs.

The WBDC needs help; we need volunteers for fundraising, management planning and a variety of other jobs. You can make your feelings and your presence felt in a campaign that is vital to the protection of the Jamaican Public Interest.

. We cannot afford to lose this beach if the people of Jamaica are to retain their rights to their own country. You can make contributions to the Fighting Fund at – Winnifred Defense Fund at Scotia Bank, Port Antonio Branch

Account N°807657

You can find out more at the website: free-winnifred.com

I urge you to become involved in this struggle. If you believe in Jamaica and understand the need to protect our nation, our patrimony and the welfare of the people, you need to come aboard

CopyrightG2007 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: impressed

Entry tags:

commentary

Too Good to be True ?

Too Good to be True ?
John Maxwell

My late great friend and neighbour, Mavis Virtue was fond of saying that most people's heads existed merely as decorative accents at the ends of their spinal columns, rather like finials on gateposts. We were discussing the reasons most people seemed to lack bullshit detectors and persisted in falling for baubles, bangles, beads and similarly meretricious inducements.
If something seems too good to be true, like Anansi's generosity or a perpetual motion machines, it probably was. We were at the time discussing the South Sea bubble and other manic events when reason went absent without leave (AWOL) and people threw good money after lunatic schemes.
When I first heard about our brand new investment schemes which returned money like a one armed bandit with its innards in an endless loop I told my wife simply that anything that seemed too good to be true almost certainly was too good to be true. The willing suspension of disbelief helps when we're watching Othello or listening to a DJ boast about his 'conquests' but one knows that reality will soon supervene and that the whole thing was imaginary.
The South Sea Bubble was a gigantic stock market speculation that began when the South Sea Company bought the British government's outstanding short-term war debts, not funded by a specific tax, be converted into equity in a new joint-stock company Briefly, the South Sea Company bought the British national debt, expecting two things– a return of 6 percent and a monopoly on trade with the South Seas i.e Latin America. There, the company expected to deliver English wool and other manufactures, to be repaid in gold by the benighted inhabitants for whom Axminster carpets and woollen blankets were obviously worth more than gold.
The company it was said, could not fail

The problem with this expected monopoly was that it did not exist. The King of Spain hadn't been consulted and made it known that there would be no monopoly of trade for anyone and in fact, instead of the fleets of ships carrying gold back to Britain he would allow only three or four British ships a year into his colonies.
That didn't stop the speculation. The South Sea Company's shares rose and kept on rising and their success stimulated other speculators and fraudists who set up thousands of companies for a variety of purposes including such esoteric enterprises as one to distill sunshine from vegetables and the classic " an enterprise whose purpose shall in due time be revealed". It made no sense but people threw their money into the bubbling pot, borrowing money to make fools of themselves.
. Sir Isaac Newton, one of its victims had realised early on that the bubble was just that and took his money out making a profit of £7,000. Unfortunately the bubble continued for so long that against his better judgment, he put in another £20,000 and lost all of it. He was led to muse "“I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people”.
Nobody noticed when Spain and England went to war again and reality clocked in only when the promoters of the South Sea Company realised that their company would never have assets matching their investment and sold out. This of course, precipitated a crash heard round the world. During the mania the government even passed a law (the Bubble Act) making it an offence for a company to do anything that was not in its original charter.
The bursting of the Bubble meant ruin for masses of people and for several generations its reverberations continued to be felt. Britain's blossoming into the financial centre of the know universe was postponed.
I was reminded of all this by a curious text message I received on my cellphone on Wednesday. It read in its entirety
CASH PLUS XMAS BONANZA. CALL620 4506 REFER AND GET:5PPL.W/END @ HILLSHIRE MOBAY A CAR DOWNPAYMENT; 40 PPL HOME DOWN PAYMENT.

It would seem that Cash Plus needs more people, investors, to generate cash flow. If I manage to bring in five people I will get a reward of the downpaymewnt on a car and 40 people will produce a downpayment on a house. Just what these down-payments are valued is not noted. I have decided after mature consideration that this offer is too good to be true.

None of the Above

Watching this week's televised debate between the US Republican Party's presidential aspirants made me realise to what profound depths the level of American politics has fallen. Apart from Ron Paul, the Great Unknown, it seemed almost impossible to get a straight answer out of anyone. John McCain, as expected, was righteous and right on the question of torture, magisterially rebuking Mitt Romney for his reptilian evasion of the question of whether 'waterboarding' is torture.
Mr Romney, whose father was I believe an honest man, was unable to say what he thought about waterboarding preferring to defer his conscience until he had had a chance to talk to military advisers if he ever became President. As a 'presidential candidate" he thought it impolitic to declare that a practice condemned by all civilised people, prohibited by the Geneva Convention, was torture. I believe that torture is just as much an offence to human dignity as Mr Romney himself.
Mr Mike Huckaby, rapidly gaining strength at the expense of his mealy-mouthed opponents, scared the daylights out of me when he said he would abolish the Internal Revenue Service in favour of a so-called "Fair Tax" – in reality a super sales tax when would impoverish the poor and fatten the wealthy.
Someone needs to remind Americans that they are supposedly disciples of Adam Smith who, fifty years after the South Sea Bubble, gave it as his opinion that the wealthy should pay a sort of ground rent for the opportunities they have in becoming rich. I quoted him two weeks ago in my column "Self-Inflicted Wounds" :
"The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state" - Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.
The Republican Presidential candidates were falling over each other to declare how anti-human they were, anti-immigrant (Mexican) anti-welfare (blacks) anti-education (everybody) and apparently anti-anything on the agenda of the civilised world since 1776. In any European country and in a majority of developing countries their opinions would be greeted by disbelief, contempt and probably, rotten eggs and tomatoes.
The brontosaurian Fred Thompson delivered it as his opinion that people should be able to fly the Confederate flag privately but not publicly for fear of giving offence. Everyone paid homage to Ronald Reagan, that intellectual giant of the Republican Party.
I am old enough to remember the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964 when the world looked on with astonishment at the Neanderthal politics of the Senator from Arizona. This was worse.
The Press, of course, is a prime culprit in these developments. I know that television is basically aimed at people well below the age of consent, but this debate really brought home to me how much American civilisation has been devalued in a relatively short time. It was instructive to hear one republican voter in a Florida focus group assembled by CNN, a middle aged woman who had come expecting to make up her mind on a republican candidate. When she was asked after the debate who she favoured she answered that she was thinking about voting for John Edwards. My sentiments exactly.
The Press or the Media as it is now fashionably called, has dumbed down the politics of the American people by mischief-making, trivialising important matters and distorting the views of anyone left of Winston Churchill. In fact, Winston Churchill's welfare reforms of a hundred years ago would probably not pass muster in the corridors of TIME Inc or the Washington Post. Richard Nixon is rightly reviled for his dishonesty, but I feel that some of the obloquy heaped on him is because he was actually, a relatively civilised human being compared to some of his successors.

Adam Smith redux

While American markets, financial, commodity and other, are braced for weeks and months of turmoil consequent of the meltdown in the sub-prime mortgage market, some people are as happy as pigs in a wallow. It has been announced that the bankers and traders of Goldman Sachs the investment bankers, are to share a bonus pot of US$18 billion this Christmas. They will get bonuses equivalent to nearly twice the national income of Bolivia.
Obviously these guys have worked really hard.
Copyright ©2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com