Mango Walk

John Maxwell

If  all my email could be taken seriously I should by now be able to pay off a significant portion of Jamaica's public debt. Every day I get two or three emails such as this:

"You have just been awarded, £750.000.00 GBP in the Toyota Online Promo, send us your Names,Address etc, etc., " and, if I were foolish enough to comply I WOULD have entered on a long walk to real penury and not be  just habitually broke.

If I ever won a really big lottery prize one thing is certain; I would immediately set up a small centre for the aggressive protection of the public interest.  

Some scams are only slightly more subtle than the bogus letters I get.  The one I am about to relate might have succeeded because it was premised on

1/ the idea that the Jamaican government has no scientific advice available to it and

 2/ the belief that all Jamaicans have swallowed the Concrete=Development Kool-Aid.

A little while ago, some con-man who must consider himself a genius, managed to get the Prime Minister to unwittingly embarrass himself in public.

According to the Gleaner: A new aluminium refinery plant is to be established on Jamaica's north coast to facilitate clean coal technology, Prime Minister Bruce Golding has revealed.

"There is a proposal before us for the establishment of a new alumina refinery that is under consideration. Inherent in that proposal is the idea of establishing a clean coal plant, which will have a capacity of 100 megawatts (MW), only 40 MW of which would be required for its processing facilities and the other 60MW would be available for sale to the national grid," he said.

Mr Golding went on to speak about 'combined cycle gas turbine power generation' as if this was a brand new JPS invention, instead of a process employed in this country for forty years.

I wish to suggest that Mr Golding immediately arm himself with a scientific adviser to prevent his being taken advantage of by unscrupulous Public Relations experts with more nerve than conscience.

There is no such thing as "clean coal" despite the Gleaner's glib attempt to pass off the expression  thus: "Clean coal is an umbrella term used to describe methods that have been developed to reduce the environmental impact of coal-based electricity."

Goodbye, 'Goggle-eye'

That is in itself an idiotic explanation; coal-based electricity has no more environmental impact than any other electricity. The environmental impact comes from the power-plants that generate electricity and the impact depends on the fuels they use. Coal is by far the most environmentally dangerous fuel and the major contributor to global warming and climate change.

GREENPEACE expresses the case succinctly:

"Coal is a highly polluting energy source. It emits much more carbon per unit of energy than oil and natural gas. CO2 represents the major portion of greenhouse gases. It is, therefore, one of the leading contributors to climate change.…The huge environmental and social costs associated with coal usage make it an expensive option for developing countries. From acid drainage from coal mines, polluting rivers and streams, to the release of mercury and other toxins when it is burned, as well as climate-destroying gases and fine particulates that wreak havoc on human health, COAL is unquestionably, a DIRTY BUSINESS.

"It is a major contributor to climate change – the biggest environmental threat we face. It is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, emitting 29% more carbon dioxide (CO2) than oil, 80% more … per unit of energy than gas."

There are ways to make coal burning marginally less polluting but they are all expensive and some are dangerous.

The most basic efforts at burning coal more 'cleanly' involve enormous amounts of fresh water. Where in Jamaica would we get that from, and what would happen to the used water?

That water, if pumped into the ground would complete the poisoning of our groundwater now underway by the bauxite companies. If pumped into the sea it would acidify and poison the water and kill marine life. Goodbye goggle-eye.

And the hotels would be on water-rationing.

But the main challenge in 'clean coal' technology is not just sanitising the coal, it is to dispose safely of the carbon dioxide. So-called carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) involves extracting the CO2 from the smokestacks, and pressuring it until it freezes when, theoretically it will be pumped into secure salt domes and empty oil reservoirs deep underground.

There are two small objections to this scenario: one is that here are no known vacant subterranean spaces in this geologic neighbourhood; and second: the  elevated seismic profile of this area is, a priori, a veto on such a practice.

While carbon dioxide may behave itself under pressure in sandstone,  in limestone CO2 becomes chemically active and soon starts dissolving ways out of its subterranean confinement.

 This is probably what is meant by the expression: "All Hell breaks loose!"

In this part of the world burning coal for any reason is an act of lunacy.

There are a few more small problems with building a bauxite plant in the Cockpit Country.

Above all is the naked threat to civilised values, the destruction of culture, the devastation of important, unique and irreplaceable biological resources, the irredeemable pollution of underground aquifers,  the ethnic cleansing of history and tradition, the subversion of small farming and the eradication of our capacity to feed ourselves. From my point of view it looks a little like cultural genocide.

The Falmouth Fatuity

   A few months ago I told you about the enormous self-contained resort ships that are about to go into competition with the local tourist industry. These new Titanics, owned by the Royal Caribbean Lines, attempt to recreate a complete land based environment at sea. I wondered at the time at the wisdom of the Port Authority financing facilities designed to compete directly with our local hospitality industry. As I wrote six months ago:

"What RCCL is doing is to transform their ships into the seagoing equivalents of Montego Bay, Negril, Las Vegas or Miami Beach.

On their newest ship, the oxymoronic Oasis of the Seas five thousand or so passengers will be housed in a floating resort town, with casinos, discos, nightclubs, dozens of restaurants, fitness centres, adventure playgrounds, bijou jungles, forests and beaches, parks, promenades, boardwalks, mini-golf courses, swimming pools, rock climbing walls, tennis courts, watersports, basketball courts, ice-skating rinks, jogging tracks, and of course, no importunate natives.

THe ship will be its own destination and its visits to places like Jamaica will be simply to dispose of waste, take on cheap water and give the staff some R&R and allow passengers to go molest some caged wildlife" (The Racehorse's Egg – April 30,2009)

The putative benefits of the Titanic visitations are supposedly that five thousand people a week will arrive to embark  on frenzied tours of Jamaica, consuming local views, buying local goods, interacting with local people and distributing scarce benefits as they go.

The reality is different

Paul Motter, editor of the enthusiast Web site Cruisemates, said. "I think it's going to be the first ship where people truly book just for the ship and hardly care where it goes."

Tor Olsen, one of the ship's captains, quoted by the Washington Post said:

"Our hope, of course, is that people don't get off, because this ship itself is the destination," Olsen said. "This is better than a lot of the islands."

And even if the passengers disembark in Falmouth they will be carefully shepherded into those shops and attractions which have paid the cruise line – under the table – for 'approved' status.

The curio sellers can go peddle their papers somewhere else.

Human Roadblock

The Port Authority's scheme  may have run into a small but significant roadblock. The PAJ, under some unknown authority, has decided to exercise its 'right' to clear the fishing village at Falmouth.

The Beach Control Authority, now part of the NRCA/NEPA complex, has a prescribed duty to defend the prescriptive rights of fishermen and the public to the beach. I would advise the fishermen of Falmouth to get a lawyer to serve a writ of mandamus on the    NRCA to compel them to do their duty and to take the PAJ to court to establish and entrench the human rights and public interest in this matter.

Which brings me to ask: what kind of Environmental Impact Assessment could have ignored those rights? And how could the NEPA approve such a fundamentally flawed development?

Unlike some people I believe the law should be a shackle – at least to prevent the unscrupulous extinction of the public rights and the public interest.

The media have not asked any serious questions about one of the largest single investments ever to be undertaken in this country – the transformation of our beautiful heirloom Falmouth into a gated them park for a specially invited clientele.

 Jamaica is borrowing more than it can afford to repay, to build an exclusive  pleasure dome to please the billionaire owners of Royal Caribbean Lines.

These people can get away with this only in Jamaica.

In Port Everglades where the taxpayers are building an even bigger version of the Falmouth Fantasy, the authorities there have shown what responsible development is.

In the first place, the Port Everglades facility will cost just half as much our Great Blue Elephant  – US $75 million to US$140 million. In the second place Royal Caribbean is paying about half the cost of the Port Everglades facility:

 "As part of the agreement, Royal Caribbean will reimburse up to $37.4 million in capital expenditures for expansion and related infrastructure needs of Terminal 18, which is already one of the largest cruise passenger terminals worldwide. Along with sister brands Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Cruises, Royal Caribbean International will generate approximately 17 million in passenger volume (embarking and disembarking) at Port Everglades during the first 10-year term of the contract."

And, an economic impact study (What's that?) conducted by Martin and Associates as part of the Port Everglades Master/Vision Plan, projects that homeporting the Genesis ships at Port Everglades will create more than 3,844 jobs, generate $172 million in personal income and $15.9 million state and local taxes. In addition, the analysis anticipates that more than 858 new construction jobs will be created during Terminal 18 expansion."

What's really interesting about all this is that Port Everglades while spending one third of the money we are, is getting benefits worth more than twice as much – and they have a contract that says so and is enforceable.

All this begs the question: Just what are the Jamaican people getting for their US$140 million investment?

 Do we have a contract? Do we have any guaranteed return on this enormous investment?

Is the development in the public interest? If it is not,

Shouldn't the investment be terminated?

I believe the Contractor General  and the Public Defender need to investigate this matter.

Now.

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

Much of the Western media and the people they serve, are almost reflexively racist. No other people are as concerned with the ethnic credentials of their neighbours. At no time was this syndrome better exposed than by the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. TIME magazine apologised for picturing him on the magazine’s cover as "darker than the hero he was". Newsweek opined that Simpson was trying to become white – "He even played golf."

This week, in illustrating a story about the increase in a world hunger the stock illustration has been a black Somali woman with her terminally malnourished baby. The story was not about starvation in Africa; it was about hunger worldwide:

World Food Aid At 20-Year Low, 1 Billion Hungry

Now there aren't a billion people in all Africa, so even the most boneheaded of editors should have used his imagination to illustrate the story differently.

According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation the tally of the hungered is as follows:

642 million in Asia and the Pacific

265 million in Sub-Saharan Africa

53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean

42 million in the Near East and North Africa

If you add together those hungry in Black (sub-Saharan Africa with those in North

Africa you will get 307 million, still less than half those hungry in Asia and the Pacific. Yet, the cliche picture is of Africans.

Being black is an undefinable abstraction. A back shoemaker in Washington 50 years ago did not recognise me as 'black' because of the way I spoke and the way I walked. In the BBC's newsroom in the late '60s my colleagues ranged between those who saw me as a black outsider – nigger – and the typist who though I had the 'most wonderful tan'. There were those who said I must be from the South Seas and others who thought that Jamaicans lived in trees.

While I was at the BBC one of their commentators said on television that ‘X’ was the first white man to finish in the 100 metres at the Tokyo Olympics. He came sixth. When Randolph Turpin beat Sugar Ray Robinson for the world middleweight title he was transformed from a 'darkie from Leamington' to ‘the Briton’ by the time the fight ended. The process was reversed in the next fight when Ray Robinson beat the daylights out of Turpin.

Last weekend, at the US Open tennis championships, the world's best tennis player lost her temper and the title match after she shouted imprecations at a lineswoman who had – wrongly – called her for a foot-fault. (Nobody mentioned that fact)

Serena was in a bad mood because the American hoi polloi, who mainly patronise tennis, was rooting for Serena's opponent, a Belgian, against their own home grown champion. In tennis, with its polite hand-claps, it is much easier for the spectators to unsettle a competitor than in most other sports. Serena lost her temper not just with the lineswoman but with the whole racist cabal of tennis officialdom and the media. YouTube videos heralded the moment by speaking of ‘the jungle’ and similarly flattering epithets

Serena was fined 10,500 and reprimanded. While she was apologising for her behavior, another tennis star, this time white, male, Swiss and named Roger Federer, was abusing the match umpire using precisely the same language as Serena had. Abusing a lineswoman is obviously a crime. Abusing a match umpire in the same terms isn't, in the free and democratic United States of America, where Free Speech rules. Federer was not penalised and most of the media ignored his lapse.

Third World USA

The Southern United States is that country's Third World, so vividly exposed by Hurricane Katrina. Unlike the rest of the Third World, the southern USA is not noted for much apart from William Faulkner, bourbon and the continuing disaster that is Miami. Its politicians who used always to be Democrats and rabidly prejudiced are now mostly Republicans and rabidly prejudiced.

The Deep South has for some time been the intellectual – if you can call it that – powerhouse of the Republican party. It is spiritual home to such as Roger Ailes president of Fox News, David Duke, the KKKlansman, and Karl Rove, once known as George Bush's brain.

In the Deep South is where you will find the most atavistic opposition to the American president, Barack Obama, for the simple reason that he is black – or perhaps as some say – passing for Black.

There you will find the most ignorant, hysterical opposition to progressive ideas of any kind, including the attempt to craft a new, more just, health service for Americans. It is in the Deep South that you will find labourers voting against unions and where Walmart was born

One of the newest heroes of the deep south is a hitherto unknown congressman named Joe Wilson whose most memorable utterance before now was his advice to Strom Thurmond's black daughter to shut up. Thurmond – the old racist – had been Wilson's boss and mentor and the protégé was terribly vexed that any details of his scrofulous past should be revealed.

Wilson was one of the three or four hundred congressmen present when their President addressed a joint session of the Senate and the House.

In the middle of the speech Wilson shouted "You Lie!" at the President, thus achieving his flyspeck place in history.

Some journalists saw Wilson's rude eructation as harmless; others, like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, heard in that outburst, the invisible snarl of the racist:

‘… fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

’The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.’

Dowd goes on to explain that until now she had not agreed with those who thought that much of the hate being spewed at Obama was race-inspired. She had classed it with the vituperation aimed at Roosevelt, Truman and JFK. She now admits:

"But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it".

Dowd may have missed a few other manifestations such as the fact that on at least two Presidential occasions men armed to the teeth have boldly paraded in the near vicinity, almost daring the Secret Service to interfere with their 'constitutional right' to bear arms. I don't believe that these men would have tried to kill the president themselves; they were merely demonstrating to others, less scrupulous, that there were other loonies like them and that it may be a good idea to go hunting a President.

The level of hatred shown to President and Mrs Obama extends into the Democratic Party itself. Obama's ‘Secretary of State and her husband as well as other opponents of Obama have all made statements that black people recognise as coded messages. One does not have to do a Henry II – ‘will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’

Perhaps what Obama needs now is to recognise himself for what he is, to do what he promised and, perhaps, to seek the advice of another turbulent priest, to wit: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama is a child of the sixties and is perhaps not black enough to realise that in this sort of situation, soft answers, far from turning away wrath, encourage it, rather like not standing your ground in front of a menacing dog.

Losses

I lost two good friends on the same day this week: Wayne Brown and Trevor Rhone. Jamaica lost two good men, two stars of the arts.

Rhone was the man who proved that one could survive as a serious playwright in Jamaica writing about the Jamaican culture. The cult of slapstick to which too many Jamaican playwrights subscribe, was not his genre. Trevor proved that there were large audiences for serious theatre about Jamaica. He was a kind and gentle man.

Wayne Brown was a gifted teacher, poet and journalist. When both of us wrote for this paper, people used to ask us whether we ever consulted beforehand. The answer was no, but both of us had the same kind of news-sense and the urge to speak truth to whomever.

Early this year, when I was in Amsterdam being treated for lung cancer, Wayne sent me an email saying that he too had been diagnosed with the same disease. Unfortunately his was a more advanced case than mine, although I had started smoking when Wayne was six, more than a decade before he started. I had had hopes that both of us would have survived until, when I went to see him three weeks ago, he told me his doctors had said that he needn't think of buying Christmas presents this year.

I am just one of thousands here and abroad who will miss these two hugely gifted men _ eloquent spokesmen for our world.

Copyright 2009 © John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

 

 On September 18, 1938, Norman Manley said:

“All effort will be wasted unless the masses of the people are steadily taken along the path in which they feel more and more, that this place is their home, that it is their destiny. They will then do more for it, more work, more effort, more thinking, more sacrifice, more discipline, and more honesty, than by any other measure you can bring in this country.”

People keep asking me why I am so hard on P. J. Patterson, George Bush and Edward Seaga. I thought that over the years I had made it plain why those three men have so deeply disappointed me. Bush is in a class by himself. Among Jamaican leaders I rank P.J. Patterson as the second worst Prime Minister we have ever had. He and Mr Seaga are almost tied in my estimation, but Mr Seaga's role in promoting strife in Jamaica gives him the edge by a short head.

I freely confess that having known Mr Patterson ever since we were both at school at Calabar I had not expected much from him as  PM. I said so at the time, but I publicly revised my expectations after his inaugural speech.. He struck the right note in several areas but the promise that excited me was his pledge to disclose his earnings and assets annually – an implicit encouragement to other politicians and bureaucrats to do the same. It was a promise to seriously reduce the possibility of corruption

That promise was never kept.

P.J. was great at raising false hopes.

 

Values and Attitudes

Shortly after he became prime minister,  Mr Patterson announced with great fanfare that he was convening an organised  public dialogue on national values and attitudes. It was an announcement welcomed universally.

Jamaicans would have, for the first time at last, the opportunity to air all our grievances with each other and the opportunity to reason them out and achieve some sort of communal understanding. That was the common expectation. It turned out to have been a delusion.

A nation to pledged become a union of disparate elements was, instead,  deeply divided by race, class and economic condition, by party politics and  jealousies and as the Prime Minister himself put it, by the `the fight for scarce benefits and political spoils carried on by hostile tribes which seem to be perpetually at war.''

Apart from providing the egregious Wilmot Perkins with a rhetorical feeding-tree for the next twenty years, nothing else ever came of an idea most people thought was just what we needed to help the society to re-orient itself to move forward peacefully and more productively. In the cricketing parlance of which Mr Patterson is so fond, the match was abandoned without a ball being bowled. Even today, nearly two decades later, there is still among many Jamaicans a sense of bitterness at the spurning of a once in a lifetime opportunity for the society to come to grips with itself, to face and recognise its contradictions in the hope that having analysed our faults, we could begin to try to repair them.

We could have embarked on a voyage to prosperity through peace and cooperation. We dropped the ball.

 

Slave ships in Kingston Harbour

In 1994 when I was writing for the then Jamaica Record, I came into head on collision with the government of the PNP. I was seriously pained by this development since I had been elected to membership of the National Executive and Executive councils of the PNP in 1964, some years before Mr Patterson achieved that distinction.

In 1992 the then newly elected  president of the United States, Bill Clinton, cravenly abandoned his promise to return democracy and peace to Haiti and to end the George H. W. Bush policy of turning back or imprisoning Haitians seeking refuge from the barbarians who had overthrown the democratically elected President Aristide of  Haiti.

As  a face-saving stop-gap, Clinton arranged for two massive hospital ships to anchor in Kingston Harbour as the mother ships for official privateers press-ganging fleeing Haitians on the high seas and bringing them to Jamaica for 'processing' – to decide whether they should be sent back to their murderers in Haiti or be among the fortunate 22% to be imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

I attacked the government for its complicity in  harbouring these floating barracoons and  in abetting this inhuman and illegal operation. I found our government's behaviour  particularly repellent because it was happening under a prime minister who had earlier  advertised himself as 'young, gifted and Black'.  In 1994 he refused his plain duty and responsibility to rescue the Haitians and to lead the world – through the UN – in recognising that if the Haitians were not free, no black anywhere in the world, and no human being of any description anywhere, could consider himself free. We should have taken the lead in restoring  the dignity for which the Haitians had sacrificed so much over more than two centuries.

Patterson's 1994 betrayal of human rights set the stage for the second overthrow  of  President Aristide a decade later. In 2004 the criminals who controlled Haiti realised that Mr Patterson, then head of Caricom, could be depended upon to do nothing to stop their brutal usurpation of power in the second independent state in the Western hemisphere and the nation more responsible than any other, for promoting the freedom of the rest of the hemisphere.

For me, the failure of the Jamaican government in this matter is an occasion of the deepest shame.

 

 

Crime and the Police

Most Jamaican politicians, like most of their constituents, believe that controlling crime is a matter of body count superiority, the American army doctrine in Vietnam that led to My Lai and other massacres and the deaths of more than 2  million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans and, indirectly, of more than 2 million Cambodians.

When Colonel Trevor MacMillan was appointed Commissioner of Police I knew that he was not a body count man. That was his downfall. Patterson and his National Security Minister needed action. They got it by effectively engineering the resignation of MacMillan and a return to the status quo ante.

Some achievement !

The MacMillan debacle, coupled with the Values and Attitudes disaster, made it almost futile to talk about peace. Few politicians have yet read the 100 or so pages of the (now 14-year-old) UWI study – "They Cry Respect" in which the people beg for peace and suggest how it may be achieved. This is so although Mr Patterson's last Minister of National Security was, believe it or not, a sociologist, complete with PhD. [Urban Poverty and Violence in Jamaica –   Centre for Population, Community and Social Change, Department of Sociology, UWI 1996].

 

The Rule of Whose Law?

The Jamaican legal system is the main factor in the celebrated "Pratt & Morgan" judgment in which the Privy Council ruled that keeping a convicted person in the shadow of the gallows for five years amounted to torture, cruel and inhuman punishment.

The reason so many Jamaican murder convicts spent so much time on Death Row was not, as officials like to allege, that they are employing every technical artifice to stay alive; but because the government's legal processes are so slow, cumbersome and antiquated. In a libel case in which I  starred, the judges recorded evidence in longhand, making it impossible for the kind of legal cut and thrust which is the essence of the advocate's practice. That is just the start. And the process is slow even though most murder cases are open and shut: most "murderers" are convicted on alleged eye-witness evidence, notoriously the most unreliable. And in Jamaica less than one in ten murderers is ever arrested, charged and tried.

In order to shorten the process and get round the five year limitation the government of Jamaica, led by P.J. Patterson prime minister and K.D Knight, Minister of National Security, decided on a novel way to get people off Death Row. They would not abolish capital punishment; they had a better idea –they would abolish the possibility of appeals to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and to the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, (IACHR) both of which had made very harsh comments on the Jamaican 'Justice' system. The government resiled from the UN Optional Protocol on Civil and Political Rights so escaping the UNCHR. It tried to do the same with the IACHR. It came as a complete surprise to them that in order to escape  the IACHR they would need to withdraw Jamaica from membership in the Organisation of American States. Such ignorance is inexcusable and says a great deal about the competence and knowledge of our rulers.

Jamaica joined an exclusive club when it resiled from the Optional Protocol. The only other member of this distinguished club is the Peoples' Democratic Republic of Korea, a paragon of democratic practice, like Jamaica.

Jamaica is one of a very small number of countries which still decrees the death penalty. Apart from the United States, most countries that consider themselves as civilised have abolished capital punishment. According to the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance "The homicide rate in those states with the death penalty is almost double the rate in states without the death penalty. “

Homosexuality

To be publicly accused of being homosexual is, in Jamaica, almost a sentence of death. The Star newspaper, several years ago published what was in effect a public mischief, alleging that homosexuals brazenly intended to assemble at Halfway Tree to march on Jamaica House to protest against the criminalisation of buggery. Hundreds of machete wielding vigilantes descended on Halfway Tree eager to dismember homosexuals. Yet politicians – notably the super-macho Edward Seaga – and others throw the accusation about with gay abandon. As I've said before, the homosexual most men fear is the man in the mirror. 

 Messrs Knight and Patterson were wont to repeat pledges that they were not about to legalise homosexuality – apparently unaware that homosexuality is not and cannot be a crime even though some manifestations of sexual behaviour are prohibited.

Most Jamaicans are also blissfully unaware that homosexuality is not a 'lifestyle', but a condition into which most homosexuals are born. If we are civilised we should know better. And our leaders should above all, be knowledgeable and civilised.

 

The Environment

Mr Patterson is one of the few surviving signatories to the Treaty of Rio – Agenda 21 – which committed humanity to treat our native planet with care and consideration. Those who signed the treaty  declared their intention to protect the environment, recognising that the environment is the foundation of life, the life support system of every earthly organism and the source of all wealth, of all food, all fuel, all minerals, all plastics and every other material, raw or processed. No Ecology=No Economy.

They pledged to involve us in planning for the eradication of poverty; to empower us to make the economic planning decisions that affect our lives, our health, safety, well-being, prosperity, peace and happiness.

Patterson and the others promised that Development would be sustainable, in our interest,  the public interest, not predatory and parasitic. Government would be open, participatory and accountable.

In Jamaica we have paid lip service to these solemn promises. The polluters do not pay. The government refuses to sign the SPAW protocol protecting particularly valuable habitats and species. Public amenity is captured for private profit. Mr Patterson was perfectly prepared to turn Hope Gardens into a gated  housing development for the rich. Thwarted by public outcry he handed the developer an even richer prize as compensation – the biodiversity hotspot and archaeological treasure of Wareika/Long Mountain. National Heroes’ Park began to be turned into a parking lot. Public beaches were captured bythe UDC to be turned over, illegally, to privaqte interests.

 So-called private development is bolted on to public infrastructure without public knowledge or consent. Developments like the Doomsday Highway are financed from public funds for private profit. Because of Mr Patterson the poor now pay proportionately more of their income  in taxes than the rich while the savings of the poor are captured and rinsed in the remittances which now sustain a third of the Jamaican population.

 

What did Patterson say?

 `The fight for scarce benefits and political spoils carried on by hostile tribes which seem to be perpetually at war.'

 

What did Norman Manley say?

“All effort will be wasted unless the masses of the people are steadily taken along the path in which they feel more and more, that this place  is their home, that it is their destiny. They will then do more for it, more work, more effort, more thinking, more sacrifice, more discipline, and more honesty, than by any other measure you can bring in this country.”

 

 

 

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

Like an eighteenth century highwayman the world financial system has levelled a gun at Jamaica's head and told us to "Stand and Deliver" – 'hand over your valuables or else!'

The Fitch Ratings Agency has told the government: Accept whatever conditionalities the IMF imposes or we will make it impossible for you to borrow money and you will default on your debts.

Since there is no Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for countries it is my view and has been for years that we should default, divert the interest payments from Cayman and Zurich to the Consolidated Fund and start making ourselves economically autonomous. At astroke we could double or triple the money available for government expenditure.

What will the usurers do? Seize King’s House?

In the old uncensored versions of the highwayman  stories, the first bandit stops the stage coach, instructs the women to tie up the men and then each other. Then, at his leisure, he and his band would go through everyone's pockets and purses.  In the old tales sometimes the highwayman would ride off with his loot, leaving his victims helpless until a second highwayman – a confederate – would come upon the scene and 'realising' there was no loot to be had, would avail himself of the pleasures offered by the helpless women and girls while their husbands or brothers or fathers watched, helpless to intervene.

Something very like that is now happening in Haiti and will soon begin to happen here. The criminal consequences of globalisation are beginning to be felt and not the least of them is loss of autonomy and sovereignty, the enslavement of the economy and the expropriation of the country's wealth.

Over the last forty years the decolonisation of Empires has left hundreds of millions of people exposed to new, sophisticated buccaneers and freebooters, sporting Thatcher/Reagan/Ayn Rand letters of marque, giving them the authority to loot and plunder using techniques which would have astonished Sir Henry Morgan, Blackbeard and Lollonais, not to mention King Leopold of Belgium, Sir Basil Zaharoff and even J.P. Morgan and John D Rockefeller.

IN one of the strange paradoxes of capitalist development it is the most resource-rich of the former colonies that are the deepest in misery. Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the Congo, Angola and South Africa are producing rivers of wealth for a few people in Zurich, New York and London. AS in Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia, and as in Iraq, Saudia Arabia and that neighbourhood, the native populations watch open-mouthed as learned theoreticians attempt to develop theories to explain their poverty and misery as money is exported by the tanker load from their countries and sympathetic statesmen confide that, next year, or the year after, they will be in a position to help with a little alms. The World Bank says it is dedicated to eradicating poverty and the IMF is supposedly a collaborator in that effort. Yet,  it seems fairly clear that Third World poverty will end only when Third World resources are exhausted and the globalisers go home, sometime late in the next millennium.

As Fidel Castro pointed out to the Group of 77 summit in Havana in 2000:

"Economic failure is evident. Under the neoliberal policies, the world experienced a global growth between 1975 and 1998 which hardly amounted to half of that attained between 1945 and 1975 with Keynesian market policies and the state's active participation in the economy."

Castro said that was also true in Latin America where doctrinaire  neoliberalism was applied.

"After World War II Latin America ha no debt but today [2000] we owe almost one trillion dollars. This is the region with the highest per capita debt in the world and also the greatest income differences between the rich and the poor.>

There are more poor, unemployed and hungry people in Latin America now than at any other time in history". 

The recent implosion of the world financial system exposed almost infinite levels of criminal complicity between various elements of the  system. A conservative critic of the system, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times said:

" A fundamental lesson concerns the way the financial system works. Outsiders were aware it had become a gigantic black box. But they were prepared to assume that those inside the box at least knew what was going on. This can hardly be true now. Worse, the institutions that prospered on the upside expect rescue on the downside. They are, alas, only too right to expect this. But this can hardly be a tolerable bargain between financial insiders and wider society. Is such mayhem the best we can expect? If so, how does one sustain broad public support for what appears so one-sided a game?"(Banque de France • International Symposium: Globalisation, inflation and monetary policy • March 2008)

The ratings agencies and the huge worldwide auditing companies turned out to be an integral part of the scam. Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex. ,told the Treasury Committee of the British House of Commons :

 "I do not think the Big Four accounting firms are fit to conduct public watchdog functions. In my submission I have highlighted how they have been involved in running cartels, tax evasion, bribery, corruption, many other things; it is difficult to see how such entities can actually deliver the public interest function. Maybe that is one of the reasons why people in the market chose not to believe the unqualified audit report when auditors were saying all is well and the marketplace were saying "We do not believe you because you have a particular kind of a track record."

The problem is compounded by the ratings agencies with their own massive conflicts of interest. Professor Joe Stiglitz says:  The incentive structure of the rating agencies also proved perverse. Agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are paid by the very people they are supposed to grade. As a result, they’ve had every reason to give companies high ratings, in a financial version of what college professors know as grade inflation. The rating agencies, like the investment banks that were paying them, believed in financial alchemy—that F-rated toxic mortgages could be converted into products that were safe enough to be held by commercial banks and pension funds."

Yet, these are the people who presume to tell us how to run our country. Fidel Castro has for decades been pointing out the system is not only corrupt, but insane.

"The Third World is forced to immobilize financial resources and grow indebted to keep hard currency reserves in the hope that they can be used to resist the attack of speculators … this leads to the paradox that with their reserves, the poor countries are offering cheap long term financing to the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world  while such reserves could be better invested in economic and social development."

When Fitch piously expresses the hope that we can reduce our interest rates from the twenties to the teens it doesn't remark on the fact that ordinary homeowner mortgage borrowers in the US can borrow at less than half that.

While Jamaica has never defaulted, it is treated with much less respect than privateers  like Donald Trump, a professional gambler and airhead.. Nearly thirty years ago when the Trump  group and the Jamaican government were facing cash flow probems and each owed about 4 billion dollars,  Trump was able to make an accommodation with his creditors which allowed him to keep his yacht.

We had to give up free education and food subsidies, among other extravagant public expenditures.

If we default it will be a nine day wonder. It will cause hardship to the rich, to the coupon clippers, but will have hardly any effect on the poor unless of course, they insist on using Pampers and buying Pringles popcorn and ice-cream imported from France.

If we tell the bankers that for the next ten years we will be paying them at normal rates of interest we will save half of the money we export to banks in foreign countries.

We would immediately double the amount available for our budget and we could then begin to do what we really need to do, invest in small farmers, in poor people, particularly in women and children, and we could probably cut the murder rate in half, simply by getting all our children in schools and their fathers growing food and employed in building those schools.

Fitch and Moody's and the rest will curse us, as they have been cursing Cuba for half a century. but Cuba's an infant death rate is  lower than the US and its educational and health systems. are superior

What exactly, have we got to lose?

Back home

I returned to Jamaica last Wednesday night after 8 months abroad, being treated for advanced lung cancer. I underwent extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatment with the result that a few weeks ago, a CT-PET SCAN could find no trace of the three tumours which had sent me scuttling for treatment.            

I promise in a few weeks, to give you an account of my treatment and the astonishingly kind professionals who delivered it at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital/National Cancer Institute in the Netherlands.

This note is simply a first, brief thank you to the many people who have wished me well, prayed for me and celebrated my recovery. And special thanks to my Jamaican doctors, Dr Richard Gomes, my GP, Dr  Abeng-Doonquah, daughter of my old friend and PanAfricanist stalwart, Dr Burchell Douglas Abeng-Doonquah, and Dr Roger Irvine, oncologist. In the Netherlands I owe much to the skill, kindness and professionalism of  Dr Peter Kunst and Dr. Josie  Belderbos and their unfailingly polite, smiling and competent colleagues, doctors,  nurses, technicians and assistants.

More anon.

Copyright ©2009  John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com                  

John Maxwell

My friend Laurie Broderick is the Minister of State in the Ministry of Energy and Mining. Laurie is the son of Percival Broderick Snr. onetime PNP MP, Minister, and President of the Jamaica Agricultural Society. He is  the younger brother of Dr Percival Broderick, onetime Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Agriculture. The Brodericks come from the hill country  of Clarendon which was serious farming country before much of  it was devastated by bauxite mining.

According to the Gleaner, three Sundays ago, Laurie Broderick made what I think is one of the more extraordinary statements ever made by a Jamaican politician.

Mr Broderick was reported as having said that the Government of Jamaica is to rehabilitate mined out lands to alleviate rural poverty. In his contribution to the sectoral debate "on Tuesday, July 21, the minister mentioned that 1,263 hectares of mined-out land in Manchester have been transferred to the commissioner of lands. He also reported that in June the government had acquired approximately 5,514 hectares of certified rehabilitated land in Manchester and St Ann.

Mr Broderick’s statement startled me because, according to the laws of Jamaica, it is the bauxite companies who are supposed to rehabilitate mined out land and, as I pointed out in an earlier column, the bauxite companies are legally required to rehabilitate – a their own expense – all mined out land and that land is the property of the government.

In a column entitled "The enduring curse of bauxite (March 22 2009) I wrote

"The [Mining] Act requires mining companies to compensate Jamaica for every hectare of land mined but not restored.

"Currently there are at least 2,669 hectares on which the companies owe us US$ 66,725,000 in one time compensation, at the rate of $25,000 per hectare. In addition the companies owe the people of Jamaica an additional US 2,500 per hectare for every year the land is not rehabilitated. According to my calculations, which are probably an underestimate, the companies owe us another US $150 to 350 million. We are talking real money here, our money– between US$200 million and US$400 million.
When is the government going to collect this debt?"

In our current situation where we need every dollar we can legally get, it seems to me scandalous that the Government of Jamaica is not taking steps to collect millions o dollars owed to the poor people of Jamaica by the bauxite companies. These companies are controlled by two of the richest men in the word, Marc Rich and Oleg Deripaska.
    As far as I am aware the government of Jamaica has taken no steps to secure the sovereign rights of the Jamaican people by collecting money which has been owed to us for a very long time. Furthermore, I believe we are entitled to know exactly who has certified the 5,514 acres of ' rehabilitated' land in Manchester and St Ann. I do not trust that description.

As I have detailed in this column before now, I have no reason to be confident that either the Commissioner of Lands or the Jamaica Bauxite Institute understands their statutory duty in protection of the public interest. In an appearance before the Access to Information Tribunal two years ago, the Commissioner of Lands, in reply to my questions, said that it was his duty to protect the bauxite companies against the inquiries of such as the Jamaican Environment Trust. He actually enunciated principles and 'conventions'– later found to be non-existent - which he said governed dealings between mining companies and their regulators. He said these conventions made information about their activities trade secrets and matters of confidence. The ATI tribunal was not only unable to find any such protocols, we found that the worldwide mining industry, like most of tee world, is moving deliberately towards more openness in order to protect not only investors, but the public interest and particularly  those citizens affected by mining. Far from owing a duty of confidence to the companies, he Commissioner according to law and practice, owed his duty to the public whose interest the law commands him to protect.

I therefore have no confidence in the ability of the government's agents to secure our interests in this matter because in addition to the failures enunciated above, the JBI and the CM&G have never demanded, as they are required to do, Environmental Impact Assessments in relation to bauxite mining.

This entails some horrendous costs to this country – costs which are legally recoverable from the bauxite companies.

The companies and the past and current governments had been planning to destroy the precious heart of the Jamaica – the Cockpit Country – by mining and alumina refining. I believe that  public opposition, combined with the fortuitous worldwide recession, is all that has so far saved the Cockpit Country which is the geological, biological cultural and historic heart of this country. If the bauxite companies were allowed to mine there they would complete the destruction of Jamaica's major water supplies and condemn the tourist industry to death. As it is, one of the major reasons for the misbegotten plan to destroy Falmouth in the interest of Royal Caribbean Cruise lines is the fact that Falmouth will be one of the few places in this region that there is sufficient water for the floating monstrosity that is  designed to steal five thousand customers a week away from the Jamaica hotel industry.

As I said in my March column, it is not simply the mining and land degradation for which we are owed compensation:

 "In addition to all this the companies are liable under international law to reclaim and make harmless nearly 100 million tons of red mud – an enterprise that would solve our unemployment problems for a decade or two and pay pensions to the bauxite workers.. In addition we are entitled to seek damages for the reclamation of the aquifers poisoned by red mud, under the Polluter Pays principle, endorsed in 1992 by P. J. Patterson in Rio."

I am unable to understand why the movers and shakers of this society, knowing all these things, do not take steps to protect our financial integrity or our patrimony and our water supplies.

If, as I believe, the ginnigogs managing bauxite are incompetent and and/or careless, is there no organ of the state to compel them to behave themselves and do their duty?

When the law is so flagrantly  flouted by those at the top of the society how can they in good conscience expect and demand that those at the bottom should respect and obey the law?

Perhaps there may be other people who feel like me and who would join me in seeking a writ of mandamus compelling the competent authorities in bauxite to perform the responsibilities laid on them by Parliament and the people of Jamaica.

Stay tuned.

Mischief and the Media

The US and British media have spent the last few weeks making fools of themselves and their audiences.

In the UK a report was issued last week by a government agency with a long history of distaste for organic farming and a tendency to welcome genetic manipulation and other industrial corruption of natural processes. The somewhat inappropriately named Food Standards Agency (FSA) issued a report which asserted – after studying a cherry-picked array of research over 50 years – that 'organic' food was not more nutritious than conventionally produced food.

Since the point about organic food is not primarily nutrition but purity and quality, it might have seemed to some cynics that the report was simply intended to muddy the water and confuse people. It certainly confused journalists. Headlines ranged from merely foolish

"Organic food has no health benefits"

to the quintessentially absurd

"It's wrong to believe that nature is always best."

And some of this garbage was written by people with degrees in science.

The point about factory farming is that it employs techniques and chemicals which alter the characteristics of food in unpredictable and often unknown ways. Pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibiotics turn up in food crops, in meat, in wild-caught fish and even human breast-milk. Organic food, so called, is n attempt to get away from the artificial, ersatz and frequently toxic adulterations of modern food. As Rachel Carson points out in "Silent Spring" humanity has had millennia to adapt to the products of its natural environment  while we have had no time to adapt to the 100,000 new chemicals introduced into the environment every year. While some of us occasionally get poisoned by natural foods, there are no known natural foods which cause the testicles of infant boys to atrophy in their mothers' wombs or produce the monsters generated by thalidomide, stilbestrol, mercury and lindane.

The Press, bless its freedom loving, investigative heart, didn't bother to try to explain the real irrelevance of the FSA study.

Innocent while Black

Sometimes the little lies are the worst. In the reporting of the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates various organs of the press said he had been arrested outside his home. It is clear from the photographs that Gates was handcuffed in his house; on his verandah or in even in his yard doesn't matter. Every citizen has a right to repel trespassers and if you have satisfied a cop as to your identity as Gates had, the cop has no further  business in your house. And if the cop doesn't know that I can't see him qualified  to teach anyone anything – as reported in Crowley's  favour.

The racist character of the police is demonstrated by several facts. One is that after the Crowley had seen Professor Gates' ID he was still asking the police  dispatcher to "keep the cars coming" as if he were confronted by a rioting mob in the city centre, instead of by a diminutive, partially disabled man who he outweighed by about  fifty pounds, overtopped by at least four inches and who was twenty years older than he.

The 911 dispatcher tried hard to get the informant, Gates' neighbour, to say what was the race of the men she saw trying to  get into Gates' house. The informant was calm, refused to panic, said she couldn't tell what race the men were and told the dispatcher that the men could have been legitimately trying to get into the house.

Crowley reported that on his arrival the informant told him she saw two black men with backpacks. She said nothing of the kind. She did not speak to Crowley.  Crowley made that up. The whole affair, from arrival to arrest, took 5 minutes. It seems unlikely that any serious breach of the peace could have happened in that time frame, unless Gates had assaulted the policeman. He had not.

 It is clear that under the law the fault was entirely with Crowley; that Gates was well within his rights and that President Obama was right when he said the police had acted stupidly.

The white police union as wrong, rude and disrespectful to President Obama as it would never have been to G.W. Bush.

One of my correspondents last week told me  that Gates should have "respected the uniform" .

I replied that respect is due to  the man and the law, not the uniform,  and I asked whether her principle applied, for instance, to that unknown Chinese hero who unarmed and alone   confronted the column of  tanks in Tiananmen Square so many moons ago?

Copyright  ©2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

 

John Maxwell

I reluctantly must confess that I have never heard of any success story associated with the International Monetary Fund in relation to its dealings with any poor or Third World country.

Certainly, in its dealings with Jamaica, the record is one of unrelieved disaster after disaster with both political parties fleeing in impoverished terror from the helpful arms of the Fund.

I will never forget the spectacle of Mr Albertelli, the Argentinean principal of the 1977 IMF team, as he scuttled away  to hide from journalists in the then Sheraton hotel after delivering the coup de grace to Jamaica's hopes for rational development.

It was therefore with some surprise that I read in the Gleaner on Wednesday a story suggesting that the Michael Manley government had more or less willingly surrendered its sovereignty to the IMF in 1977. According to Gary Spaulding, Senior Gleaner Writer:

"There was no global economic crisis 32 years ago to shoulder the blame for Jamaica's economic predicament, but on Tuesday, January 19, 1977, when Prime Minister Michael Manley told the House of Representatives of his administration's intention to pursue a borrowing relationship with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), his rhetoric closely matched that of the present government."

Oddly enough, I remember not one, but several international crises that provided a background for the Manley recourse to the IMF. These included the so-called Arab Oil Shock of 1973 et seq. because of which – according to the most easily accessible source – Wikipedia: "A world financial system already under pressure from the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement experienced a series of recessions and high inflation that persisted until the early 1980's, and elevated oil prices until 1986."

Among the crises I remember was the devaluation of the US dollar, the quadrupling (or worse) of the price of gasoline and to quote Wikipedia again: "Underscoring the interdependence of the world societies and economies, oil-importing nations in the noncommunist industrial world saw sudden inflation and economic recession. In the industrialized countries, especially the United States, the crisis was for the most part borne by the unemployed, the marginalized social groups, certain categories of aging workers, and increasingly, by younger workers. Schools and offices in the U.S. often closed down to save on heating oil; and factories cut production and laid off workers. In France, the oil crisis spelt the end of the Trente Glorieuses, 30 years of very high economic growth, and announced the ensuing decades of permanent unemployment."

If the effect of these crises on the developed countries was so profound and long-lasting it should not take a genius to understand the effect on totally open economies like Jamaica, totally dependent on imported oil and overwhelmingly dependent on imported food.

Put briefly, the IMF thought our aspirations were too ambitious and decided to put us in our proper place. I believe that this judgment was both racist and political, made by a bunch of 'crazy baldheads' of the same ilk as are now persecuting Haiti.

You can see their point: We had a National Minimum Wage while the English and Americans were still talking about one, we had free education from basic school to university, we had ambitious unemployment relief schemes – the Emergency Employment Programme and the Pioneer Corps, among others, we had decreed maternity leave for every woman worker in the country, including domestic helpers and sugar workers. For the First Time At Last!

There was also serious intrigue. Jamaica had prepared a negotiating position with the IMF – a top secret document. Imagine the delight of the IMF and the total discomfiture of the government when this 'Top Secret' document was broadcast on RJR by the leader of the Opposition, Mr Edward Seaga.

It was a blow from which this country has never recovered. A Minister and a Permanent Secretary were initially found guilty of breaching their trust. They were later acquitted on appeal.

I have never understood why Mr Seaga, a former cabinet minister and bound by the same oaths and undertakings as those in office , was never prosecuted for his breach of trust. He was, however, later excoriated by the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Eric Williams for his disloyalty to Jamaica when he went to the IMF and World Bank, arguing that they should not help Jamaica. As it was, and as Seaga discovered for himself while Prime Minister, the IMF and its sibling were never about helping Jamaica; and when Mr Seaga had the opportunity in the 80s, he ran away from them as fast as his little legs could carry him.

I wonder what my friend Clovis would do now if the current leader of the Opposition were to behave now as Mr Seaga did then?

Brutal and Procrustean

What I called "the brutal and Procrustean strictures of the World Bank and the IMF, forced us to cut taxes and public services, to raise interest rates to farmers and in fact, to turn us back, back to desperation.      

In 1998 the then head honcho of the World Bank, one Wolfensohn,  lied like a trooper  to more than a thousand Anglican bishops at the Lambeth conference, saying that the had given US $200 million to Jamaica to ease poverty. He had not. But Argentina, with a preponderantly European population and considerably richer than Jamaica, got $200 million for poverty alleviation. The World `bank gave them the money  to do some of the things the IMF suggested amounted to  criminal mismanagement when we did them in Jamaica

 In other words, Michael Manley’s Emergency Employment Programme – the Crash Programme – and the Pioneer Corps became living realities in Argentina thanks to the World Bank but were  a wicked misuse of money in Jamaica.

What we should be looking for in these times of trial and tribulation is not an IMF recipe which basically, calls for cutting expenditure, chopping jobs and going even further into recession.

In my opinion, the most significant statistic of all the dread figures bandied about is the drop in the precipitous drop in remittances from Jamaicans abroad. Remittances account for  17% of Jamaica's GDP which means that one in every six dollars worth of Jamaica's output – or more crudely – one in every six dollars spent in Jamaica comes courtesy of Jamaicans abroad.

Since remittances have dropped by 17% in the first six months of this year and may drop even further. This money goes mainly to people at the bottom of the society so it is my guess that for these people, the drop in remittances represents much more than a twenty percent cut in their living standards – it may represent twice as much.

What we need now

This should tell us where the development aid should go. I once said to Michael Manley that it might make more sense if our foreign aid were simply distributed in cash and benefits to the poor rather than being spent on planning and Pajeros. 

According to the newspapers, Badrul Haque, special World Bank representative, is looking for a plausible explanation as to why one third of `Jamaica's potential workers remained outside the labour force.

The answer is in monoculture –sugar cane – our shopkeeper culture  and the effects of our openness to IMF solutions. The IMF's answer to everything is for us to become more competitive, which means that we need to reduce the take-home pay of our workers until they can compete with the near slave labour of Bangladesh, Indonesia and other southeast Asian labour forces.

Earlier this year, in April, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank predicted that the present global crisis could become an economic disaster for poorer countries with millions being driven into unemployment.  "Poor people could suffer the most and we must act in time to prevent a human catastrophe."

I believe that the Emergency Production Plan of the 1970s – produced by the people themselves – was a superior option to the private sector-driven retreat to the IMF. Both involved hardship, but the Jamaican self-reliance plan would have had the effect of building social capital, encouraging cooperation and cementing communities while producing small scale enterprises especially in the production and marketing of food. The IMF solution simply produced misery.

Today, we are offered alternatives, the alternatives offered to poor people whenever they are in problems – sell your capital assets and further impoverish yourselves, borrow large amounts of foreign exchange for building facilities for foreigners. We will be  building a gigantic  public sanitary convenience for Royal Caribbean cruise lines by destroying Falmouth, capturing Up Park Camp to build another deadly ghetto in the middle of  Kingston while ignoring the desperation in the slums of  Kingston, Spanish Town, Ocho Rios, Montego Bay and Negril – concrete time bombs which, one day, who knows when, will explode with devastating consequences for the rich, the poor and everybody in between.

Let's give the multipurpose stadium to UTECH to produce thousands of  Masters of  Business Administration who will end up on the streets here or abroad while the food they could be growing is imported from abroad,  produced by 'farmers' who fly planes to work. Let's take away the beaches and the playing fields from the poor because they won't know how to use them and instead of producing more Bob Marleys and Usain Bolts they will be producing more Sandokhans and Jim Browns.

We have a choice. We have always had a choice and we almost always make the same mistake.

Copyright © 2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

 "Why should there be one standard for one country, especially because it is black, and another one for another country … that is white. “

In September 2002 the Iraq War was still six months and dozens of lies in the future. People all over the world were still appealing to the good sense of President Bush–  a chimera – as it transpired. They thought that they could appeal to reason, to an ethical consciousness, to the general human instinct to obey the rule of law and the mores of the community of which you are a constituent.

Some of us were not fooled.

Nelson Mandela, for instance, whose words are quoted above, was not taken in by the lies and pretensions of the American junta. I was myself excoriated for my treatment of Bush and his coven. In fact I had revealed what some saw as my prejudice when I wrote, before Bush was ennobled by the Supreme Court:

 "The real George Bush, if he is appointed President, will use his time to destroy the integrity of the country he rules, starting with the Supreme Court. Then he can start on dealing with  the rest of us.  That’s his job, and as the American Press has made plain, nothing needs to be known about him and his  multifarious incapacities because Big Brother in the giant corporations will tell him what to do.

We are all in a for a very rough ride." –Democracy? Enough Already!   

That was written on December 8, 2000, before the hooligans in Florida and their accomplices on the US Supreme Court presented the world with the precious gift of G. W. Bush.

Less than a year later, a few days after the 9/11 attack, I wrote  "No matter how violent and horrific, the terrorist action on Tuesday remains an act of criminal violence, not an act of war. Various spokesmen and supporters of the US government, including Tony Blair,  the British PM, speak of attacking and defeating Terrorism as if there were some  central directorate, a sort of Terror International, with identifiable officials and institutions. "

Like most of the human race I was alarmed by the reactions of those in power in the US and Britain:

 " Mr Bush, whose own legitimacy has been questioned,,  speaks, even more ominously, of "ending states " that support terror, as if politics were a video-game in which the baddies can simply be zapped into non-existence. One of his spokesmen, a Mr Wolfowitz, is even scouting the possibility of targeted assassinations of foreign leaders. Dead terrorists, of course, can't be punished. Someone else must therefore pay."

Many  thought that some of these ideas were uttered in the heat and panic of the moment.

Some of us were not so sure. Nelson Mandela again:

“ If you look at those matters, you will come to the  conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a  threat to world peace. Because what [America] is saying is that  if you are afraid of a veto in the Security Council, you can go  outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other  countries.

“That is the message they are sending to the world.  That must be condemned in the strongest terms. And you will  notice that France, Germany Russia, China are against this  decision. It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W.  Bush’s desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United  States of America. “

As I wrote at the time: "The all important quartet who are for war are Bush himself, Field Marshal von Rumsfeld, the elusive vice-President Dick Cheney and that  ineffable puritan and creationist in chief,  John Ashcroft. Between them, they have spent not one day as soldiers, but they are anxious now to prove their steely mettle to the last drop of someone else son’s  blood. "

Mr Wolfowitz's idea of targeted assassinations, most of us thought, was well outside of civilised behaviour; not what we would expect from the leaders of a great democracy.

But in Mr Bush's State of the Union address in 2003, he made some disquieting remarks –

"In Afghanistan, we helped to liberate an oppressed people, and we will continue helping them secure their country, rebuild their society and educate all their children, boys and girls.…As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better…To date we have arrested or otherwise dealt with many key commanders of Al Qaeda. …All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries.

"And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

In this speech Mr Bush accused Saddam Hussein of great lies, of denying possession of huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, of concealing his nuclear capabilities, of trying to buy uranium from Africa  – for the news of which Mr Bush credited Tony Blair and the British. It was a tour de force of deception and an attempt to frighten the world in joining the US in an illegal, preventive war. It was Mr Bush's argument for the persecution and murder of Saddam Hussein.

We all know the consequences; Iraq is en route to becoming a satellite of Iran and heading for geopolitical dismemberment; Afghanistan is in flames; Pakistan is teetering on the edge of dissolution and Al Quaida is accusing the US of plotting to seize Pakistan's nuclear armoury. The new US administration is trying bravely to restore American credibility, to dispose of thousands of people scraped up from all over the world, tortured and imprisoned without cause.

And, we finally have confirmation that Mr Wolfowitz's modest proposal for the US to send professional killers abroad to murder people suspected of disloyalty to the US was, put into effect , as Mr Bush hinted in his  State of the Union speech.  Unknown numbers of people considered enemies by Bush and Cheney were quietly liquidated, erased from the human record, "terminated with extreme prejudice" – foully murdered by agents of a state out of its mind.

 " … And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

Many of us thought that this was Bush rhodomontade, exaggeration to preen. We now know that this illegal programme was in fact a reality. We know that the government of the United States was itself actively  subverting the laws and Constitution  of the United States of America, contravening settled International Law and Conventions and the charter of the United Nations and betraying  all principles of decency and civilised behaviour. And we now know who was in charge.

I admit to a severe prejudice against Dick Cheney, who I regard as an unprincipled, rapaciously greedy predator – a sort of  human Komodo Dragon.

Cheney is terminally weird. His wife reported that when Cheney was a Congressman and an aide in the Reagan White House – “ … we lived in Washington and our daughters were young, he would take them    on weekends to visit battlefields, or sometimes to watch a battle re-enactment.  Liz and Mary loved spending time with him, but on occasion they were heard to beg for relief -- a trip to the zoo,maybe. "

I know I risk boring you with another quote from an old column, this from August 11, 2000 entitled "The persistence of Delusion":

"Am I alone in thinking there is something weird about a man who would  force his infant daughters to  study battlefields? And, since most battlefields in the US  are Civil War battlefields, isn’t it pretty clear what was in the back of his mind?

"Cheney has never been bashful about being backward and reactionary. As a congressman he voted against the Head Start Education programme for poor children, against the banning of armour piercing, flesh-destroying bullets, he opposed the Clean Water Act, he was against insurance for people who had lost their jobs, against the school lunch programme, against abortion for women even if the mother’s life was in danger and even if she had been raped. Cheney is the naked face of US reaction …"

The US Congress has been startled by many disclosures, but none, I think, as profoundly as  the recent discovery that Cheney, lacking any  legal authority to do so, had instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine programme to murder people deemed to be enemies of Cheney or Bush who, together,  clearly, constituted and embodied the state of the United States of America.

This is not an exaggeration: Cheney ordered the CIA not to disclose this programme to the Congress of the United States in stark contravention of the law and Constitution of the United States. It seems that it was almost by accident that the current head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, heard of the programme and discovered that it was still operational. He closed it down immediately.

In some countries Mr Cheney's behaviour in subverting an agency of the state to perform criminal acts would be deemed 'High Treason" with all the condign penalties attaching.

Anyone who incites or deputises other people to cause grievous bodily harm to third parties is guilty of a serious criminal offence, according to laws  in force in every country in the world. Anyone who  commits, solicits or incites murder is a murderer and if he does so as a means of intimidating other people he is a terrorist.

In his holy war against Terror, Mr Bush was clearly looking in the wrong direction.

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

 

John Maxwell

 

Some of my readers may have thought I was unduly harsh in my description of journalism as becoming  a refuge for pimps, prostitutes, sexually dysfunctional and psychopathic reporters and editors, peeping toms and frotteurs.

If you were one who thought me cruel, I would commend you to try to follow the story now unfolding in the British press concerning the man I call the world's voyeur in chief, Rupert Murdoch and his menage  of media properties and hacks for hire.

 The News of the World  touts itself as Britain's biggest-selling newspaper featuring the best news, showbiz and sport exclusives - and- on the web this week it promises the worlds sexiest video and the "50 most shocking celeb photos".

Although it is only a dozen or so years younger than the Gleaner, Britain's News of the World,  (NOW) a weekly, has always been more venereal than venerable. I remember years ago, reading the NOW's exposes of pitiful prostitutes and the Jamaican pimps who lived off them. The NOW clearly regarded Jamaicans as a scourge and I well remember my amazement at their exposure of one in particular with a name like Eleutherios Christiades – the sort of moniker one expects to find in Ginger Ridge or Salt Spring. These pathetic stories Invariably ended with the prostitute having been paid and   ready to play her part, when the NOW reporter, chivalrous to the end reported that he had "made my excuses and left".

The NOW seems, at long last, to have run out of excuses for its 'journalism'.

Which is sad, for such a crusading, high-minded newspaper, always alert to exposing sinners in high and low places. Like a great many Jamaicans,  the zealots of the NOW  cannot abide the idea that somewhere, someone may be having more fun than they are – and are determined to get to the bottom of these iniquities and abominations.

One almost had to sympathise with the newspaper's fury when, last year,  a high court judge decided that the paper had no right to pay prostitutes to film their client, Max Mosley, in a sadomasochistic romp in which Mr Mosley paid the prostitutes to dress up like prison guards and flog him. The court decided that the NOW had no right to invade Mr Mosley's privacy and ordered the newspaper to pay him damages and costs totalling more than three quarters of a million pounds.

The NOW, in its outraged reaction, insisted that public figures must maintain "standards".

"It is not for the powerful and the influential to run to the courts to gag newspapers from publishing stories that are true", the newspaper thundered, proclaiming "This is all about the public's right to know".

I cannot imagine why the public needed to know that Mr Mosley, like many Englishmen, is addicted to being whipped. You pays your money and you takes your choice, as the saying is, and if no one else is being hurt, the problem would seem to be in the minds of people even more maladjusted than Mr Mosley who are compelled to poke their noses into other people's business and to judge them and scandalise them.

Criminal misbehaviour

According to Nick Davies in the `Guardian this week, almost as those high-minded  words were being published by the NOW, the newspaper was itself engaged in using the courts to cover up a disgraceful history of criminal misbehaviour driven by the need to invade the privacy of hundreds of people, most of them guilty only of being well known.

You may recollect that about two years ago an English reporter, Clive `Goodman,  was jailed for hacking into the phones of three members of the staff of St. James' Palace. A private investigator who had abetted Goodman admitted hacking into the phones of five other targets, including the chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, Gordon Taylor.

Taylor sued News Group, (Murdoch's company which owns the NOW) .

According to the Guardian's Nick Davies:

"News Group denied all knowledge of the hacking, but Taylor last year sued them on the basis that they must have known about it.

"In documents initially submitted to the high court, News Group executives said the company had not been involved in any way in the hacking of Taylor's phone. They denied keeping any recording or notes of intercepted messages. But, at the request of Taylor's lawyers, the court ordered the production of detailed evidence from Scotland Yard's inquiry in the Goodman case, and from an inquiry by the information commissioner into journalists who dishonestly obtain confidential personal records."

News Group realised that the game was up and settled with Taylor, provided he would agree not to say anything about the settlement. There were settlements with two other victims, on similar confidential terms.

As Davies reports "The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators."

Davies, a real investigative journalist, reveals that the News of the World was an absolute hive of illegal activity, targeting thousands of people including Tony Blair's Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, the model Elle McPherson, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, comedian and TV personality, Lenny Henry,  football manager Sven Goran Ericcson, cabinet ministers, MPs and apparently, anyone the NOW editors felt like 'feeling up'.

The News of the World managed to convince the court to seal the file on the Taylor case to prevent all public access – although as Nick Davies points out, the file contained prima facie evidence of criminal activity.

Famous Last Words

The News of the World assured a parliamentary committee that reporter Clive Goodman was§ acting alone and that his accomplice was a rogue agent. The  Press Complaints Commission  was told that Goodman's behaviour  was "aberrational", "a rogue exception" and "an exceptional and unhappy event in the 163-year history of the News of the World, involving one journalist". The News of the World's managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, who told Radio Four's Today programme in February 2008 that only one News of the World journalist had been involved in illegal phone hacking: "It happened once at the News of the World. The reporter was fired; he went to prison. The editor resigned."

Rupert Murdoch himself  told Bloomberg News that he knew nothing about the payments. "If that had happened, I would know about it."

Murdoch's lieutenant, Les Hinton, then chairman of News International and now CEO of the Murdoch-owned `Wall Street Journal made similar excuses before leavingfor New York, as did the editor of the NOW Andy Coulson, before he left to become the personal communication aide to Britain's Opposition Leader, David Cameron.

Yet, a former senior employee of Murdoch's  Andrew Neil,  who was editor of the Sunday Times, said the NOW had no defence for its actions. He saw no defence based on the public interest: "It is illegal. That doesn't mean that it should never be done, you may have a public interest defence. But that's not the case in any of this; it was a fishing expedition …If …there was something of  real major importance, you could have a public interest defence. But breaking into Gwyneth Paltrow's voicemail after she's just had a baby is not in the public interest. I'm at a loss to know what the public interest could be."

Mr Neil joined former Deputy PM John Prescott in questioning why the police had not told top politicians and others that their privacy had been compromised. "It's not just a media story; it raises serious questions for Scotland Yard, top prosecutors and for judges."

Neil didn't understand why the Crown Prosecution Service failed to act and why a court, faced with evidence of conspiracy and systemic illegal actions could agree to seal evidence. "That was completely wrong" and left the British criminal Justice system itself in the dock.

Roy Greenslade, a former senior Fleet Street editor reports in his blog that since the Goodman story broke three years ago, journalists were saying that hacking was endemic at the NOW, information obtained by hackers was readily available and used by reporters as a matter of course. It was a newsroom out of control.

And, as he points out, it is inconceivable that an editor could be entirely ignorant of a process widely used in his newsroom. "It is inconceivable that any journalist could have produced a story without revealing its provenance." Andrew Neil makes the same point, contradicting the silly American idea that journalists can confer on their sources, immunity from questioning .

The story becomes even more poignant when it is realised that the News of the World's  phone hacking was not their only criminal adventure. The Information Commission revealed the names of 31 journalists working for the NOW and its stablemate, the Sun, together with details of government agencies, banks, phone companies and others who were conned into handing over confidential information. This is an offence under the Data Protection Act unless it can be justified by public interest.

Reporters and editors were commissioning multiple purchases of confidential information  illegally obtained and  openly paid for and itemised by the newspaper's  accounts departments .

As Roy Greenslade wryly comments: "Perhaps News International's other … papers could carry leading articles calling on the News of the World to come clean, echoing their persistent demands for transparency at Westminster.”

It is, of course, all about the public's right to know.

The News of the World has one option: it can always credibly plead that their reporters, editors and editorial executives were simply incompetent, puritan ignoramuses who were not really journalists. But that’s not going to help them defend the thousands of civil suits about to descend on the Murdoch seraglio.

Copyright © 2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

'They ate her alive' was the opening sentence of my 1997 column following the death of Diana, the ex-wife of the heir to the British throne. It continued:

'As she lay broken and covered in blood, as she lay helpless and mortally wounded, they were, as always, professional, shooting fast, furious and careful of camera angle,  hoping perhaps to capture her last breath, to profit one last time from her suffering,  to take the million dollar photograph which would  put them at last  on the same level as their prey, enjoying a life of ease and big money.

They always wanted to make a killing from Diana.

Last Sunday morning in Paris, they succeeded.

It is  horrible to imagine  that Diana’s  last view of this world might have been the flashing cameras of the cockroaches of the Press.’

Michael Jackson was luckier. He died at home, apparently of a heart attack, although if you read the British newspapers  the day after – tabloid or 'quality' – you might believe that Michael Jackson was murdered or died of a drug overdose. There was no more evidence of those things than there is that Jackson was a child molester, but to say that is to court ferocious hostility and hate because there are people in this world who KNOW the truth and are not to be contradicted by evidence unless delivered by divine messenger. Jackson died without   permission from the media.

If one looks carefully at the mass media of the western world it soon becomes apparent that the death of Michael Jackson is the biggest money-making opportunity for them since the death of Diana. The Daily Mirror makes it explicit with a tag-line following every Mirror story on the web. It reads:

 “Michael Jackson dead at 50. All you need to know about the King of Pop.”

And, if like the Times, most of their stuff is second or third or fourth hand, or invented, malicious and libellous, who cares?

 Jackson is dead and can't sue, and under American libel standards set by their Supreme Court 42 years ago, were he alive he couldn’t sue even if he wanted to, because as a public figure, and a public figure more public than any other in history, it would have been almost impossible for him to sue even if he could prove that his maligner knew that what he was saying was untrue but said it anyway with reckless disregard for the truth. With Jackson surrounded by bloodsuckers of every breed, rank and description, from crooked district attorneys to suborned employees and journalistic moles, there was so much crap  in the air that it was impossible for anyone – perhaps even Jackson himself – to disentangle truth from fantasy.

Public personalities and particularly show business personalities  are, ipso facto,  all creatures of fantasy.  Canute, king of England, Denmark and Norway more than 900 years ago faced a smaller but no less intractable problem. His courtiers may have seen the ocean's tides disobeying the king, but that was no doubt because the King was playing a game.

What the Nanny ‘saw’

As the old nursery rhyme says

 Big fleas  have little fleas

Upon their backs to bite 'em

And little fleas have lesser fleas

And so on ad infinitum

I was reminded of this by a bizarre story in the Sunday Times of London.  The beginning of the story should prepare you for whoppers to come:

"Grace Rwaramba who cared for King of Pop and his children has shocking secrets of his addictions and bizarre nomadic life."

This elaborate work of art details how Grace the Nanny, fired by Jackson in 2008, was  “working  through her phone calls to LA on Friday, desperately trying to ensure that the children were comforted after losing their father, she sobbed and screamed and became more incoherent.

“Yes, this is it . . . because (crying) this is it . . . because he started avoiding everything. We were trying to help him and they fired me because of this (sobs).”

Yet, not knowing where the children were and not having spoken to them, Grace Rwaramba, in a London hotel,  informs the  credulous Times reporter that –

'the children had been anxious about their father and had been trying to care for him — “he hasn’t been eating and the kids have been so scared for him”.

'Worried by the endless goings on in the Jackson compound Grace turned to me at the end and said: “The youngest one has been saying, ‘God should have taken me not him’.”

Clearly, Grace is either telepathic or  psychopathic.

Why was the Times interviewing the nanny in the first place? They are silent about this, but clearly the intention was to dish up as much dirt as possible to coincide with what would have been a triumphal return for the King of Pop in 50 concerts sold out almost as soon as they were announced.

It’s a dirty job, but hey! someone has to do it.

The Times is owned by the world's voyeur in chief,  Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Sun, the News of the World and the New York Post a well as the unfair and unbalanced Fox TV news network.

Other newspapers were not much better except that most of them seemed somewhat more discreet with rumours and hearsay.

 

Blaming the fans

In the  Times the lady who wrote "What the Nanny saw" followed up with a learned disquisition  entitled "The fans killed their idol; they always do"

Disingenuously she tries to turn the blame onto the fans and away from the real criminals:

"We know how the stars loathe the paparazzi, smash their lenses, call them — as Hugh Grant did this week — wankers and losers. But what they can’t, daren’t, say is how deeply they loathe their fans — their pestering, cloying, snatching, the demand for photos amid a private dinner, the sneaky snapping with their crummy mobile cameras while a star is buying a latte, pushing his kid on a swing, their high-horse outrage when a demand is politely refused."

She blames the fans when it’s the media voyeurs and intruders who manage the lunacy. She carps at Angelina Jolie whose "fanbase are the  reason, as much as great wealth, that Angelina Jolie feels she can demand a no-fly zone over part of Namibia while she gave birth there …"  Guess what, the no-fly zone was to protect the mother and child from paparazzi who hired planes to try to peep into the most private moments of a family's life. If one had crashed into the house, obliterating mother child and father-to-be Brad Pitt,  it would, no doubt,  have been ascribed to the onerous responsibilities due to Freedom of the Press.

Fans don't kill their idols; the murderers are in my so-called profession – now, more than ever – a refuge for pimps, prostitutes, sexually dysfunctional and psychopathic reporters and editors, peeping toms and frotteurs, who are the guys who can gaze at a trembling, shattered human being, on the verge of suicide, and yell "Jump! Jump!" as they make sure their cameras are correctly  focused.

I once met Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and when I told someone at work the next day the girls gathered round. It was Burton they were interested in.

“Did you shake his hand? " one asked.

‘Yes.”

“Which hand?" she asked

“Why, the right one of course”, at which the young woman took my right hand and kissed it.

This happened in the BBC World Service newsroom, not among a gaggle of semiliterate hysterics.

This week Elizabeth Taylor herself, in whose violet eyes I would have drowned given time, declared that she cannot imagine life without her friend Michael Jackson. His ex-wife, Lisa Marie Presley, Quincy Jones, Diana Ross, Oprah Winfrey, Paul McCartney, Dionne Warwick, Beyonce, Martin Scorcese, Donna Summer, Stephen Spielberg,  Mariah Carey, Uri Geller, Cher, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jane Fonda, Lisa Minelli, Sophia Loren, Celine Dion, Madonna,  and many many others famous and noteworthy, who knew him and loved him, grieved at his death, along with millions more round the world. They grieved because they had lost someone important to them. Crusty steelworkers in Gary,Indiana, his hometown, grieved, as did millions more young and old, rich and poor, famous and unknown, people in prisons and Nancy Reagan and  KIm Dae Jung, former president of South Korea, Imelda Marcos, black, white and every shade in between, and their grief propelled several of Jackson's hits back into top spots on music charts all over the world, causing, among other things, a near 2,000 percent increase in demand for his songs on US radio stations and the slowing down of the Internet itself.

To the imperial media Jackson was guilty of everything of which he had ever been accused, like Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley and John Lennon. The problem with all of these and with Bob Marley, Patrice Lumumba and Jean Bertrand Aristide  is that they connected in a fundamental way with ordinary people, and that, to the rulers of our world and their servile media , is supremely dangerous.

Lennon said "All we need is Love"; Jackson sang "We are the world"; Martin Luther King, Bob Marley and Aristide preached “Get up, Stand up! Stand up for your rights!”

All of them clearly reckoned without the Imperial Media and the new Lords of the Earth.

 

Copyright 2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

 

John Maxwell

The Haitian constitution of 1805 was the first national constitution in history to declare that all human beings were equal with equal rights, privileges and responsibilities. After a short preamble the constitution declares that it is made –

"… in presence of the Supreme Being, before whom all mankind are equal, and who has scattered so many species of creatures on the surface of the earth for the purpose of manifesting his glory and his power by the diversity of his works, in the presence of all nature by whom we have been so unjustly and for so long a time considered as outcast children.

"Art. 1. The people inhabiting the island formerly called St. Domingo, hereby agree to form themselves into a free state sovereign and independent of any other power in the universe, under the name of empire of Hayti.

2. Slavery is forever abolished.

3. The Citizens of Hayti are brothers at home; equality in the eyes of the law is incontestably acknowledged, and there cannot exist any titles, advantages, or privileges, other than those necessarily resulting from the consideration and reward of services rendered to liberty and independence.

4. The law is the same to all, whether it punishes, or whether it protects.

"We, the undersigned, place under the safeguard of the magistrates, fathers and mothers of families, the citizens, and the army the explicit and solemn covenant of the sacred rights of man and the duties of the citizen.

Some of the duties of citizenship are enumerated in the constitution; Among them:

9. No person is worth of being a Haitian who is not a good father, good son, a good husband, and especially a good soldier.

10. Fathers and mothers are not permitted to disinherit their children.

11. Every Citizen must possess a mechanic art.

21. Agriculture, as it is the first, the most noble, and the most useful of all the arts, shall be honored and protected.

Under the Constitution, the army is the creature of the state and obedient to it; Due process is guaranteed, the house of every citizen is an inviolable asylum, and the Emperor is prohibited from making wars of conquest.

While the head of state is styled Emperor, the position is elective and not hereditary.

The entire text of the constitution may be found here:

 http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/1805-const.htm

I am no expert on constitutions but I would bet that there are few if any that attempt to define the responsibilities of citizens to the extent the Dessalines constitution did.

What is particularly striking about this constitution is the emphases placed, first on parental responsibilities, then on skill and training and finally on the on husbandry of resources by protecting and  and developing agriculture.

These three principles suggest to me that the founding fathers of Haiti were, in the most essential sense, serious environmentalists understanding the duty of the citizens to husband the national patrimony   in the interest of all.

'…the vilest scramble for loot'

Haiti was one of the products of the crazed scramble for gold and other emblems of wealth following European exploration of the Western hemisphere and Africa. Millions of indigenous people were exterminated or enslaved, their civilisations laid waste in a multi-century pillaging described by Joseph Conrad as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience”.

The so-called Industrial Revolution was a process by which raw materials stolen from 'primitive' populations were transmuted into unexampled wealth by human fuel in the form slaves and serfs supplemented later by  the fossil fuels coal and petroleum.

Within a century and a half of the start of the Industrial Revolution a Swedish scientist, Svante Arhenius, was warning that human activity was warming the globe by what is now known as the Greenhouse Effect.

Nobody took the threat of global warming seriously until about half a century ago when results from the first International Geophysical Year began to create alarm, strengthened a little later by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which described all life on earth being caught in the deadly crossfire from new chemicals, plastics, herbicides, pesticides and others that were transforming the American Way of Life into the American way of Death.

Humanity began to wake up to the fact that all of us, black or white or brown, poor or rich, were on a collision course with disaster.Following the Stockholm conference on the Environment in 1972,  the United Nations was moved by growing concern "about the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development."  In 1983 the UN   General Assembly recognized that environmental problems were global in nature and determined that it was in the interest of all nations to establish common policies for sustainable development. The UN decided to convene the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), known by the name of its Chair Mrs Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway. The Bruntland Commission echoed the Haitian constitution when it declared that "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

The Haitians version was  that no one was allowed to disinherit their children.

The  Bruntland Commission prepared the way for the groundbreaking conference of heads of government – the so-called Earth Summit of 1992 at which every country in the world was represented –  to design a road map for sustainable development to give all human beings an opportunity to satisfy their basic needs within the limitations of the environment's ability  to meet present and future needs.

The Earth summit was an attempt to give effect to the promise of universal rights through universal action. The key element  of the agreement, the Treaty of Rio – Agenda 21 –was that every community in the world should be entitled to decide its own way to sustainability and that every person should have a say in this global decision making.

It was a noble aim and every world leader signed on to it, including our own P.J. Patterson  and George Bush I of the US.  The signatories committed themselves to a variety of objectives, the most important of which was t h idea of community Agendas designed by the people for the people.

Spectacular Disrespect

Few states in the world have failed as spectacularly as Jamaica to honour their obligations under the treaty. We actually drew up a document to guide Local Development Planning in Jamaica but there has essentially been no action to enforce the people's rights to a clean, supportive and productive environment. The main guarantee of this, Environmental Impact Assessments, are a bad and stale joke.

The European countries, six years after Rio, drew up an agreement designed to give their citizens the rights envisaged in Agenda 21 – the treaty signed by Jamaica and nearly 200 other countries.

This agreement, the Aarhus Convention   on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters – is a document which more than any other single instrument, epitomises the real meaning of democratic rights and self government in the modern world.

In the words of the UN Environmental Commission for Europe –

" The Aarhus Convention is a new kind of environmental agreement. The Convention

- links environmental rights and human rights

- acknowledges that we owe an obligation to future generations

- establishes that sustainable development can be achieved only through the involvement of all stakeholders

- links government accountability and environmental protection

- focuses on interactions between the public and public authorities in a democratic context.

The subject of the Convention goes to the heart of the relationship between people and governments. The Convention is not only an environmental agreement, it is also a Convention about government accountability, transparency and responsiveness.

The Aarhus Convention grants the public rights and imposes on states and public authorities obligations regarding access to information and public participation and access to justice.

Jamaica has more than most other countries, demonstrated a contempt and disrespect for the principles enshrined in the Agenda 21 and in the Arhus convention.

We have talked the talk, big time, but we have not only not walked the walk, we have sedulously avoided doing so.

If we go back long before Agenda 21 we will discover that Jamaica, like many other countries, treated the environment with disrespect, if not outright hostility. We destroyed the most productive protein producing piece of seawater in the world, Kingston Harbour and transformed it into the world's most beautiful toxic dump and cesspool. We did not have to do it. Even in the 1920s when we decided to use the harbour as a sink for human waste, there were well known and reasonably priced alternatives. As always, we chose the easy way, the destructive way out. Our laws in relation to bauxite mining were well meant, but were studiously ignored. More recently we have come close to destroying our premier botanic gardens, an erstwhile valuable educational and economic resource and recreational asset, like Kingston harbour, because some greedy developer wanted to put an upscale housing scheme in what would inevitably have become a private park.

Destroying National Treasures

We are trying our damnedest to destroy the Cockpit Country, an asset of almost unimaginable potential, a cultural, historical, ecological and hydrogeological resource which we have not properly explored before we decide to destroy it.

 

We are in the process of stealing public amenity in our public recreational beaches to be handed over to Spanish hotels and other private interests and we are in the process of transforming one of our most beautiful towns into a colonial slum dedicated to the processing of excrement and other wastes from cruise ships and to make it a tourist-only apartheid facility in which the only Jamaicans will be those who serve the foreign visitors.

 

Pretty soon the only beach available to Jamaicans may be Puerto Seco, handed over to the Jamaican people by Kaiser Bauxite who should never have had any ownership rights in the first place.

 

We are in the process of destroying Negril, fifty years ago one of the world's most beautiful beaches. The destruction is caused by illegal groynes – built against expert advice –  by the UDC, a public corporation, and by sewage pumped into the Negril Morass by the UDC, which, together with the humic acid released by UDC dredging of the morass, has killed off the sand-flake producing algae and finally, by the over fertilisation of the sugar plantations on the fringes of the morass.

 

The morass is itself a valuable resource because it is the main guarantor of the Negril beach as well as an important nature reserve with multi-million dollar potential as an attraction for Jamaicans and visitors. We prefer instead, to build artificial attractions, featuring imported wild animals while we kill off our indigenous plant and animal  life by a process of malign neglect. Because we have not thought about housing the thousands attracted to the development areas we have officially encouraged squatting and the misery, squalor and crime which accompany these developments.

 

But, there are of course,  always the end-of-pipe solutions. The IMF killed off our 1978 plans to restore Kingston Harbour to economic productivity both as fishing grounds and as recreational area. We would have restored the hillsides, removing the squatters who destroy nearly US$100 million worth of land every year and putting them to grow food on the flat land still monopolised by sugar cane. Now, thirty years later, we are going to go back to the IMF to get some useless, expensive and counterproductive advice which will simply saddle us with more debt, more homelessness and more crime.

 

Two hundred years ago the Haitians said that no one has the right to disinherit their children.

 

Jamaicans do not agree.

 

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

 

jankunnu@gmail.com