Mango Walk

John Maxwell

Fifty years ago last Monday, an event occurred which transformed Jamaica. The launch of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation transformed the Jamaican culture,  theatre, music, politics, journalism and the Jamaican language.

In its periods of independent existence the JBC transformed the Jamaican idea of Jamaica, of Jamaican personality.

I am one of the few survivors of that day. Most of that small band are dead and most of those who aren't are scattered to the four winds. The JBC was Jamaica's real entry into the modern world and it excited enthusiasm and animosity in equal degree, provoking a struggle which persists to this day between those who know themselves to be Jamaican and those who charitably  patronise things Jamaican and other pastiches of a Jamaica which never existed outside of travelers' tales.

On June 14, the day before the official launch, the new broadcasters of the JBC presented an ambitious showcase of their talents, programmes ranging from a major radio drama, a concert by the JBC Orchestra playing Jamaican music, Jamaica comedy and  high-class soap opera, Jamaican news and a Jamaican newsreel bringing Jamaicans for the first time face to face with themselves and their work, the commonplace and the sublime.

Two of the items for which I was responsible on that day were an interview with Hollywood star Errol Flynn and an interview recorded on a mule-drawn dray carrying supplies for fishermen on the road to Portland Cottage.

We stunned Jamaica.

The papers and the verandahs for weeks afterwards could talk of little else but the Jamaican accents which had never before been heard on radio. Until then two kinds of diction were permissible on Jamaican radio: the clipped BBC accents of Dennis Gick and his ilk with  their J.B.Priestley plays,  or the real (and occasionally fake) American accents of the announcers on Radio Jamaica. Jamaicans heard instead, for the first time, at last, the voices of Miss Lou (Louise Bennett) Mass Ran (Ranny Williams) Charles Hyatt, "Pro Rata Powell" (Ken Maxwell), Jack Neesberry (Carrol Reckord).

 But what amazed everyone was the fact that the news – world news and Jamaican news, were written and edited in a Jamaican newsroom, and read by Jamaicans like Reggie Carter, Joy Gordon and Richard Harty.  And,  for the first time at last,   it wasn't really necessary to listen to the BBC – which we continued to  broadcast once a day to calm the nerves of those  who could not believe that Jamaican journalists could possibly compete with English journalists. When I went to work for the BBC News  eight years later I realised that we had been  working twice as hard for half the pay and delivering a product at least as good as our august competitors and often better.

 A decade and a half later, in 1975, I was congratulated for my handling of Britain's deputy Prime Minister, James Callaghan, one of the rudest and stupidest politicians I have ever met. The man who congratulated me was Sir Robin Day, then the doyen of  British TV journalism. With a group of English journalists, Day came up to me in the Sheraton hotel where all of them had been watching my nightly interviews with people like Archbishop Makarios and Indira Gandhi at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference

"Great work." said Robin Day, "I hear you are called the Robin Day of Jamaica!"

"Oh!" I said, you must be the guy they call  the John Maxwell of British television!"  and after some more  good natured banter we all repaired to the bar to talk about politicians.

Norman Manley, whose idea the JBC was, was never in any doubt that Jamaica and its people were as good or better than any nation anywhere and when the JBC began to prove it by exposing Jamaican musicians, like Carlos Malcolm, Foggy Mullings, and Ernie Ranglin, Don Drummond, Toots Hibbert, Count Ossie and Bob Marley, Jamaicans were astonished at the depth and breadth of Jamaican musical genius and the idea that world class could mean Jamaican.

It was the JBC whose attention to the mento, jankunnu, kumina  and rastafari cultures brought them to the notice of their own people and the world. It was the JBC that created the market for Jamaican musicians and producers where none had existed before.

In the three years before independence the JBC was identified as a threat by those whose idea of Jamaica had concretised in 1944, when people spoke of demoracy-in-embryo and the need for tutelage in governance. When the JBC presented public affairs programmes that began to expose the realities of the society many were alarmed. C.L.R. James was astonished by a documentary I did in 1960 about the people who lived on and off the Dungle, who were allowed to tell their stories as if they were important. James thought that this was revolutionary stuff and prophesied that the powers that be would not long allow that sort of exposure.

He was right. When the JLP won the pre-independence elections in 1962 the JBC and myself in particular became immediate targets. One dispute was about JBC's alleged disrespect to the new government. The JLP said that JBC news was not dignifying  Ministers by terming them "Honorable" as they said we had always styled the PNP Ministers. Fortunately we were able to produce a memorandum written by me two weeks after the JBC opened, in which we decided that honorifics such as "the Honorable" would be dispensed with except in cases of official announcements and things like death notices.  They still didn't believe us.

We were always suspect, because we were not intimidated by anyone. In 1960, during the so-called Reynold Henry 'uprising',  Wills Isaacs, acting as Premier while Manley was on a few days leave, insisted that we publish a ministerial statement by him calling upon Jamaicans to hunt down and capture and hogtie all stray bearded men  in the interest of national security. We refused to broadcast the speech. Wills called me up, as the person then in charge of the newsroom and when I again refused he called Mr Manley. I told Mr Manley, when he called, that I had referred the speech to our legal adviser, Leacroft Robinson and he had agreed with me that the broadcast was an incitement to violence. When I told Manley this he agreed that we were right and told Wills to cool it.

A very similar row broke out  in late 1961 or early 1962 when the JLP wanted us to put out a news release calling on "JLP Freedom Fighters" to give Mr Manley "a hot reception" on his return from pre-independence talks in London. I was again the person responsible for refusing the broadcast, on the same grounds I'd given Isaacs  in 1960. Seaga and Lightbourne were at Bustamante's house and got the old man to phone me to persuade me to allow the broadcast.

I refused and then Busta  put on the Commissioner of Police, Noel Crosswell who said he saw nothing wrong with the release. Again I had Leacroft Robinson's advice and again I refused.

When Manley arrived at Victoria Pier by motor-launch from the airport all hell broke loose, with Seaga's "Freedom Fighters" locked in battle with Isaacs' Group 69. During the fracas Isaacs' licenced firearm fell to the ground and fortunately was picked up by a responsible adult. No one was seriously injured but I have always wondered what would have happened if Seaga's call to arms had been broadcast.

When the 1962 elections finally came  I was not among the JLP's favourite people. Within weeks I was again in trouble. In my weekly news review I had been scathing about the departing British. After 300 years, I said, they had made the munificent bequest of one million pounds, sufficient to run the basic administration of the country for eleven days. They had also generously donated Up Park Camp, which I said was simply because they could not take it away.

On the following Monday Mr Seaga with Sir Alexander Bustamante in tow, both dressed in funereal black, arrived at the JBC to see, by appointment, the chairman, the jeweller, L.A. Henriques. They got him to agree that I should be sacked, over the objections of Hector Bernard who was then the Acting General Manager.

When the rest of the JBC Board heard what had happened they immediately convened a meeting to inform Henriques that he had no authority to sack anyone. He was forced to resign.

I was reinstated.  A few weeks later the entire board, with the exception of Henry Fowler, was sacked.  A few months later I was again fired, on a trumped up charge and by way of a post-dated letter signed by the General Manager, A.L.  Micky Hendricks, who at the time was in London on JBC business.

The new government of independent Jamaica did not understand the necessity for the autonomy of a public service corporation such as the JBC. They saw malice in any decision that went against them and were totally unable to accept any criticism. The PNP, demoralised in defeat, was unable to defend the principles on which we had always operated. Eventually in 1964 the newsroom rebelled against the attempt by Seaga and the new JBC Chairman Ivan Levy's  to be news editors.

Despite the first largely middleclass strike and the longest in Jamaican history until then, the gallant workforce of the JBC was defeated and most forced into exiles

The JBC was transformed into a partisan mouthpiece – an image which it never shook – because the JLP were determined to destroy everything we stood for.

I had another innings at the JBC in the 1970s when I was personally painted as the implacable enemy of the JLP and of Edward Seaga, because I had run against him in the 1972 elections when the PNP could find no one willing to run in the brand new garrison of West Kingston. Although my candidacy was solely to prevent Seaga running unopposed and being elected on nomination day, it was taken as an impertinence and an insult to Seaga.

Despite this, however, the JBC managed to recover some of its self-respect. I personally remember with gratitude the opportunity I was given to start the first real talk-show in Jamaica, the Public Eye.

Public Eye had a few signal achievements, presenting for the first time  public exposure of police brutality in the person of Peter Tosh, whose account of his mistreatment brought Jamaica up short. People knew that police brutality was fairly common, but few realised how pervasive it was. When I spoke to Peter Tosh he was still relatively obscure but well enough known to make a big impression.

Public Eye was also mainly responsible for the successful campaign to reverse the unfair convictions and secure the release of Michael Bernard and six other men on death row because of perjured evidence.

Our greatest achievement, however, was in raising the Jamaican consciousness about the condition of working class women. Shortly after the programme began in February 1974 I interviewed Rosamund Wiltshire and Gillian Monroe who had just done an undergraduate thesis on the treatment of domestic helpers, up to then called servants and maids.

 

After the interview I invited the domestic helpers of Jamaica to phone me and tell Jamaica their stories. Soon, telephone locks were being imported by the thousands, so that householders could prevent the truth being told. I was accused of scandalising the middle class and one day an expensively dressed  chatelaine in a stush Mercedes Benz spat at me as I walked down South Odeon Avenue. After more than a year of agitation Michael Manley, at the instigation of his wife, Beverley, called me up to Jamaica House one day.

 

"What are we going to do about the helpers?"

 

I had an answer –  suggested by the helpers themselves. Since they couldn't form a union and couldn't strike the society had to find the means to protect them from exploitation. A National Minimum Wage was the answer, but a National Minimum Wage policed by a special office which would also be responsible for defending all their rights.

 

Manley knew that everybody had said a national minimum wage would never work, that if implemented it would cause mass unemployment; but he, Beverley and I thought we should do it because it was right. Without consulting his Cabinet except for David Coore, he simply announced in Parliament that the government had decided to implement a National Minimum Wage and an office to supervise it.

 

Pandemonium. Jamaica knew the time had come for justice for the largest section of the labour force.  Respect was due.

 

The impact of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation on Jamaica has never been measured. It is my opinion that in its short periods of independence, the JBC helped begin the transformation of Jamaica from an ignorant colonial  backwater into a civilised society. We have a long way to go, but the JBC proved that we have the brains and the will to do it. 

 

 If our traditions had been maintained I cannot imagine that 50 years later a Jamaican Governor General would be flying to Buckingham Palace to be knighted by the Queen as if he were some middle-ranking British civil servant.

 

In our cosmology, honour flowed not from England, but from the cane-cutters and domestic helpers, from the small farmers and the higglers, from the Rastas and all the people who constitute Jamaica, as we know it

 

When they say "Respect is Due" we know what they mean.

 

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

 

jankunnu@gmail.com

 

 

John Maxwell

The British have some intriguing and utterly inexplicable national idiosyncrasies that confound and alarm  outsiders. One such is the tendency, from time to time, for discrete sectors of the society to explode into fits of self-righteous self-abnegation accompanied by the shrill screams of journalists and other domestic prophets, apparently transfixed by visions of the most appalling doom and calling for important human sacrifices to forestall the baleful destiny about to overwhelm them.

For most of the last two weeks, if one believed the heavyweight British press, Prime Minister Gordon Brown was just seconds away from political hara kiri, pushed to the verge by the well-timed and apparently selfless resignations of some of his ministers, resignations, like banderillas in a bullfight, meant to madden and enrage the bull beyond endurance, forcing him to self-destruction.

It didn't work.

The British Prime Minister, more like an ancient Aurochs than the modern toro bravo,is  a stolid Scots bull not easily impressed by commentators' frothing at the mouth or journalists fleeing from rationality. The excitement was an attempt by the Blairite yuppie wing of the Labour party to seize control of  the one-time working class political machine, thus completing a Blairite/Thatcherite capture of the engine-room of British politics.

The problem for them is that the Thatcherite counter-reformation has been everywhere discredited  and, that without Gordon Brown,  the plundered British economy would have been heading toward Argentina and the IMF even faster than it now seems to be.

Britain's economy is now, probably thanks to Brown, the only significant European economy showing any sign of recovery. Even the Scandinavians, relatively insulated from the capitalist melt-down, have found their residual social democratic social infrastructure under threat from economies they tried to help, like Latvia and the other soi-disant Baltic "Tigers".  Professor Steve Hanke's divinely inspired Currency Boards are failing, just like the Central Banks whose faults they supposedly abolish. Latvia, the former darling of the investors has announced that it expects GDP to fall by 18% this year. That's even worse than Jamaica.

The problem in Latvia, Ireland, Iceland, the United States and in Jamaica is that our economic systems depend on the untenable assumption that we must grow in order to survive.

There is a very eminent economist named Herman Daly whose work I have mentioned before and who, for most of his life, has argued for the economics of steady-state development. Daly, who is 4 years younger than I, is the founder of what we call ecological economics or steady-state economics.

He has worked for decades in proposing a steady state economy, and for policies to guide society towards a stable population, a constant material standard of living, and an equitable distribution of wealth.

 "The goal of a steady state is to sustain a constant, sufficient stock of real wealth and people for a long time.  No one denies that our problems would be easier to solve if we were richer. The question is, does growth any longer make us richer, or is it now making us poorer?"

For Daly and other ecologists, the biosphere, the thin planetary skin of soil,water and air that sustains us is the ultimate determinant of our behaviour. Since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, positive growth is possible in one place only if there is corresponding negative growth somewhere else. When bankers "create" wealth by extending credit nothing material is actually produced; what is created is a bubble.

If we take any living system, for instance a human body like yours or mine, we will find that optimal health does not depend on perpetual growth but on maintaining a careful balance in all dimensions. Human beings, whales, mahogany trees, coral polyps, bacteria and crocodiles all start small, as single cells, and achieve maturity when they cease growing, reproduce themselves and in time, return to the carbon cycle – ashes to ashes, etc.

The only organisms which insist on an untrammeled right to grow are cancers and capitalist organisations like banks. But since banks do not actually create anything except demand and notional obligations, the wealth "created"  cannot have any validity  unless it is necessarily extracted by parasitism of one kind or another or what some economists call 'rent' and others,  'surplus value'.

Various ecologists have calculated that we are living beyond our resources, that to sustain our notional wealth we are running a deficit in our account with the biosphere – we are extracting more than we can replace. Our consumption of oil currently allows some of us to live at  an extravagant level which will disappear when the oil runs out.

It has been calculated that to live indefinitely – even at our current unsatisfactory per capita standard  – we need the resources of  an additional planet. If all of us were to live like Americans we would require the resources of two additional uninhabited planets.

In Jamaica, wealth was "created" over the centuries from slave labour or, to put it more accurately, the plantation system was simply the theft of the labour value of the slaves and its conversion into bills of exchange, stock exchanges and palaces like Versailles.

The fact is that half a millennium after Columbus began the ecological and cultural devastation of the "New World" we are still depending on the superstitions of capitalist theocracy. Our estimable Minister of Finance a few weeks ago appealed to the Caribbean Development Bank "to play a pivotal role in securing the economic transformation of the region."

He was speaking in the Turks & Caicos, which some suspect is  itself another kind of bubble.

"The global economic crisis does not only pose severe challenges to member countries, but it also creates opportunities for doing things in new, innovative and better ways, and the CDB is well positioned to anchor these new and necessary initiatives,"

Mr Shaw cited the fresh- and processed-foods sectors as one area that offers vast potential for expansion as the markets in tourism and the Caribbean Diaspora offer many opportunities through linkages and the demand for ethnic foods.

Most Third world politicians and bureaucrats would find no fault with Mr Shaw's analysis, nor would I, if there were any prospect of it working.

Why, with millions of hungry visitors to feed, is Jamaica not straining to feed them?

 Were we to produce twice as much food as we do now we could not satisfy the demand from our visitors.

And you ask me why we are poor?

Mr Shaw's prescriptions depend on the mobilisation of finance capital, whose owners' charge expensive rents.  And the technology? We've been there before, with private entrepreneurs making nice returns fifty years ago in garments and building materials and even in the canning and export of food. And then they retire to Bermuda or Cayman to enjoy a well-earned retirement, ready to rent their Jamaican- derived capital.

We are mobilising the big money battalions, to capture the beaches of Portland, Trelawny Hanover and the South coast making them off limits to Jamaicans. We are  planning to make Falmouth a gated apartheid city at a proposed cost of more than US$150 million to provide day trippers with  cheap water, sewage processing and the opportunity to fondle imported wild animals.  We could use half of  this same money to do what the British are doing  installing machines to generate power from ocean currents and cutting fossil fuel imports.

On what basis does any government justify such perverse decisions?

Where is the EIA?

If we are to borrow money it seems to me wise to invest that money in ways that will continue to pay back, in human skills and production.

Jamaica is probably the most favourable site in the world for producing power from ocean currents, being in the middle of one of the world's most powerful currents, the North Equatorial Current and its associated systems from the Orinoco and the Amazon.  Offshore from Manchioneal to Port Antonio we have perfect sites for wind powered turbines. The breeze – the North-east Trade winds – the people tell me, never stops blowing.

We have the opportunity to put people back on the land, to rehabilitate Jamaican land and farming and to produce the food we are very soon not going to be able to buy.

 We won't be able to buy it either because we will not be able to afford it, or, second, even if we could afford it, it will not be available.

That's when we will begin to understand the reality of the police state.

We need to mobilise our people, rich, poor and in between, to understand that we need each other, and that if we are not ready to help each other there is no help for us, no matter how many bankers we know.

Don't say I didn't tell you.

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com.

 

John Maxwell

The older I get the more evidence seems to accumulate that the greatest enemy of world peace and popular enlightenment may be the profession of journalism.

Somebody once said that generals are always prepared to fight the last war but the truism seems to fit at least as well when applied to journalists.

Take the New York Times editorial on Thursday; it begins, portentously:

"For 50 years, the Cuban people have suffered under Fidel Castro’s, and now Raúl Castro’s, repressive rule. But Washington’s embargo — a cold war anachronism kept alive by Florida politics — has not lessened that suffering and has given the Castros a far-too-convenient excuse to maintain their iron grip on power."

Anyone who knows anything about the history of the last 50 years might be forgiven for total bafflement.

Let us leave aside the statutory abuse and go to the embargo – which the NYT describes as a Cold War anachronism which had not 'lessened the suffering … etc.'

In the first place the embargo was originally designed and has been periodically reinforced  specifically to make the Cuban people suffer and to punish them for not rising up and overthrowing their government. The embargo is – in terms of international law – an act of war, and it has always been meant to have that effect on the Cubans. If any nation had declared war on the US, would the US expect that to improve the conditions of the US population?

The embargo is so punitive that it even bans medicines and vaccines for children from the Cubans. It was and is an attempt to make the Cubans grovel in their misery and cry "Uncle" – as in 'Uncle Sam'. The fact that the opposite has happened is not a matter for inquiry by the NYT. Instead, says the Times:

"So we are encouraged to see President Obama’s tentative efforts to ease the embargo and reach out to the Cuban people. At the same time, we are absolutely puzzled and dismayed by this week’s frenzied push by many Latin American countries to readmit Cuba to the Organization of American States.

"Cuba, which says it has no interest in joining, clearly does not meet the group’s standards for democracy and human rights."

The writer is obviously not aware that in the world outside of the United States, in the United Nations, the margin of support for ending the embargo has grown steadily since 1992, when 59 countries voted in favor of the resolution. The figure was 179 in 2004, 182 in 2005 and 184 in 2007.

Last year apart from the US, only Israel and one or two other superpowers like Palau voted against the resolution, while Micronesia and the Marshall Islands abstained.

The delegate speaking on behalf of the European Union, France's UN deputy ambassador Jean-Pierre Lacroix  said the 27-member  bloc rejects "all unilateral measures against Cuba which are contrary to common accepted rules of international trade." The Antiguan representative, speaking on behalf of the 132-nation  Group of 77 and China, said the alliance renewed its call on Washington to lift the embargo which not only undermines the principles enshrined in the UN Charter and international law, but threatens the [now sacred] principles of free trade and investment.

The New York Times is unaware that the Iberian/Latin American nations long ago welcomed Cuba in from the cold, even holding their 1999 Summit in Havana. There, the Spanish, Portuguese and Mexican heads of government criticised what they called Cuba's lack of democracy, but did not see their differences as unbridgeable.

At that meeting, attended by the King of Spain, among others, the leader of the Cuban revolution defiantly declared that it was ``an impossible task to persuade Cuba that it should abandon the ways of revolution and Socialism,'' Fidel Castro said.

``Almost nobody thought Cuba could survive the fall of the Socialist bloc ... but we thought differently and were determined to fight,'' said Castro.

But even before that, when the revolution was only 25 years old, I happened to be in Havana during the Malvinas (Falklands) War, when streams of Latin American diplomats came to Cuba to ask advice from and to pay homage to Cuba and to Fidel, who had condemned the Thatcher Reagan aggression – as they saw it – against hemispheric political integrity.

And when the US condemns the Cubans for their lack of democracy there is an unconcealed irony in their position, not to say hypocrisy. The so-called dissidents that Cuba is accused of persecuting are in fact paid agents of the United States, whose motives may be as innocent as saints, but who are in fact, under Cuban and international law, working for a foreign power with whom their country is at war, in a war declared not by Cuba but by the United States.

The New York Times, like the people Castro calls the Miami Mafia and like other anti-Cuban forces, does not apparently believe the Cubans have any right to defend themselves from American attack.

"We understand the desire to fully reintegrate Cuba into the main regional organization. But as Human Rights Watch argued this week: “Cuba is the only country in the hemisphere that repudiates nearly all forms of political dissent. For nearly five decades, the Cuban government has enforced political conformity with criminal prosecutions, long- and short-term detentions, mob harassment, physical abuse and surveillance.”

The people the NYT and HRW are defending are the foreground players in a multilevel criminal assault on the Cuban polity. Over the years thus assault has included terrorist bombings such as the sabotage of the arms ship La Coubre which exploded in the Havana docks in 1960, killing and maiming hundreds, terrorist campaigns in the Escambray and other parts of Cuba, targeted assassinations, biological warfare killing Cuban children with imported strains of hemorrhagic dengue fever for instance; economic biological warfare targeting sugar cane, tobacco and citrus, among others with exotic diseases; terrorist bombings of hotels, targeting tourists, plots to blow up the Tropicana, the world's most famous nightclub and its audience and cast of hundreds;  and the unremitting campaign to kill Fidel Castro with more than 600 known attempts on his life.

And while we talk about Cuba let us not forget about the US attempts to spread democracy in Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua and Haiti, among others, leaving the landscape littered with the corpses of men, women, children, nuns, priests and journalists.

No one can convince me that the Cubans have no right to defend themselves and their revolution. Had Maurice Bishop taken their advice he might still be alive. But for some people, for me to say that the Cubans may have a case is a demonstration of moral and intellectual depravity.

So be it.

Posada Carriles

I happened to be in Havana in 1960 shortly after the ammunition ship La Coubre had been blown up with huge loss of life. Everybody I knew tried to discourage me from going. I was sure to be killed.

I wasn't injured or in any real danger, although the night I arrived some gunmen in a speeding car sprayed the main shopping street with sub-machine gunfire. The air was charged. The day after I arrived I went for a walk with my camera aad ran into a black Cuban on Monserrate street, where he lived. On discovering I was Jamaican and a journalist he told me that he was a communist, a trade unionist and that though the revolution was not communist, he approved of it. We walked to the Parque Central, where the permanent tiled chessboards may have witnessed the genius of Capablanca and where, on that day – May 20, 1960 – Cuba's official Independence Day and my own 26th birthday, various patriotic things were happening. Among them a group of Pioneros – the revolutionary equivalent of Boy Scouts were practicing for a parade. I began to take some pictures and was quickly stopped by a tall young main in civilian clothes who made it plain that I was under arrest.

Monserrate accompanied us to the nearby police station.

I quickly discovered I was in difficulties because Id left my passport behind in my hotel, the nearby Siboney. But they had no one to go with me to get it. How to prove who I was?

Because I spoke English I was an American!  Monserrate convinced me to scour my wallet for some form of ID. All I could find was a temporary press pass to the United Nations from the year before. Monserrate took one look at it and jumped for joy. See, he exclaimed (in Spanish of course) my friend is Ingles (English) because the pass said I was a British subject. The Brits were friends of Cuba.

The week before I arrived Life magazine had published a spread on Cuba, featuring the very troop of young Pioneers I had set my sights on.

The photographer had been a black American. 

The photo spread had been titled

"Fascism in Latin America?"

As we say in cricket, the Americans had already begun rolling the wicket. The sugar quota was cut while I was there. The revolution was not even 18 months old.

A quarter of a century later I was on the steps of Jamaica House, chatting with Michael Manley, having just interviewed  him for some European radio station. Somebody burst out of the house with the news that a Cubana airliner on its way to Jamaica from Barbados had been bombed out of the sky

Manley's reaction was shock and horrified disbelief. He went inside to phone his friend Fidel. The horror was palpable. Most of those on the plane were little more than children, the Cuban junior fencing team, some young Guyanese en route to medical school in Cuba and others.

Two of the culprits were soon discovered, tried and imprisoned. Another, one Luis Posada Carriles, alias 'Bambi'  – the mastermind,  has since that day 33 years ago, been under the protection of the United States of America. American agents have engineered his release from a Venezuelan jail and later from a Panamanian jail after an failed plot to blow up Fidel Castro along with several other Latin American leaders and thousands of Panamanian students in a concert hall.

This terrorist, a CIA asset from the time of the Kennedy assassination, lives, protected in Miami in a country whose last president promised to go after terrorists wherever they were and regardless of who protected them. No question of moral or intellectual depravity here, of course. In addition to the Cubana bombing he was responsible for some hotel bombings, one of them fatal to an Italian tourist.

Meanwhile, five Cubans who had infiltrated the Miami Mafia and were supplying information about the terrorists the US said it was committed to hunt down – people  like 'Bambi' – were given long prison sentences in solitary confinement for taking George W Bush at his word.

Fidel Castro has long made it plain that Cuba has no wish to rejoin the OAS. Latin America knows this, despite which the OAS members decided to rescind the 1964 decision. It will mean nothing, practically, but for the Latins it is a matter of honour.

For them the OAS has been a yanki weapon against all of them, from Arbenz to Allende to Aristide to Fidel, Chavez and Morales. It does not end.

Their pilgrimages to Havana 25 years ago may have served  no practical purpose either, but for Latin America it helped restore their self-respect.

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

If you don't believe that Jamaica is a suffocatingly small country consider this: I was at school with the fathers of three of the four JLP candidates who were foreign nationals when they contested the most recent general elections.

I was at Calabar with Peter Fakhouri, father of Shahine Robinson and at Jamaica College with Douglas Vaz and Desmond Mair.

In a letter to the Editor earlier this week I said believed that the Chief Justice and the Court of Appeal were wrong when they decided that voters had not thrown away their votes when they voted for people who they were warned were not qualified to be elected. I need to withdraw that opinion and apologise for not having paid proper attention to what the judges actually decided..

According to the judges, the voters were entitled to believe the then Director of Elections when he vehemently and quite erroneously, assured voters that they could ignore the PNP's warnings on the subject. As the law stands, the voters need to be unambiguously certain that they are voting for  a candidate who is unqualified before they can be judged to have thrown their votes away. There was no way they could be assured of the actual situation in time to do much about it.

What is sad and unforgiveable is that such a situation could have arisen at all.

Caveat Emptor

     The problem faced by the judges was not simply  between the interest of the candidates, but with the public interest,  and since they were dealing with the votes of tens of thousands ofd people they would have been remiss, as I must admit, to disqualify candidates and to install in their places people who did not win a majority of votes.

The cases have opened a serious can of worms, because the constitution and the Represenation of the People Act (ROPA) clearly never envisaged such a situation.

We need to revise the constitution and the ROPA to make sure that the people are not  let down by a system which failed in its due diligence to guarantee that the Director of Elections was actually qualified for the post and failed in other ways to ensure fair and decisive elections.

The revisions also need to protect the public interest against the possibility of innocent or wilful misunderstanding of who is and is not eligible to vote or to be elected for any office subject to electoral choice.

When my own father was disqualified in an election petition 75 years ago it was because a judge decided that he was too poor and  did not pay sufficient taxes to be elected a member of the then Jamaican parliament. The man he thrashed was declared elected in his stead. My father, according to lying testimony accepted by the judge, was not a taxpayer of sufficient weight. N.W Manley, who represented the successful petitioner, was nonetheless  saddened that the law should be able to deprive people of their preferred choice simply because the man they chose was judged to be too poor to represent them.

Fortunately for my father his opponent collapsed and died soon after the judicial decision and whatever deficiencies existed in his papers were corrected for the ensuing bye election, which like the first, he won by a landslide.  His opponents said my grandmother had worked a little obeah on his behalf!

Members  of the Jamaican parliament wield tremendous  power over the lives and destinies of everyone in this country.   As I said earlier, I went to school with the fathers of three of the four affected MPs and I don't consider them to be either wicked or dangerous. But the point is not whether we can trust Messrs. Vaz, Mair and Mrs Robinson. The question is what we will do when someone unscrupulous discovers this backdoor to power and decides to exploit it. What would happen if Mr Mark Rich  or Mr Derepaska were to plant a mole or two for the next election?

In curing the present defects we will need the goodwill and good faith of all members of parliament and of the electorate who must be part of the decision and the cure..

 But is it realistic to expect that this parliament will move to cure its own deficiencies and, in the process, lose its majority?

Practical men

The world is full of practical men and Jamaica seems to be cursed with more than our fair share.

One product of the practical men is that towering white elephant known variously as the Forum hotel and the Adventure Inn which has sat, balefully  mouldering, for nearly forty years, near Port Henderson at the western edge of Kingston harbour. In the 80s Mr Seaga bought this totally useless lump of concrete, glass and steel from the developers, the Matalons,  and our taxes are paying for this and other mistakes of the practical men.

We do not understand that even if an investment is made by the private sector as the Forum was,  we Jamaicans eventually must pay for it in a variety of ways, by increased interest on money borrowed by the state, on lowered bond ratings, in loss of alternative employment for capital, and so on.

The practical men are even now advancing the plan for the Nauru-isation of Jamaica. Some of us have known for years that Jamaica west of the Wag Water,  is essentially half bauxite and half  limestone and this fact, newly discovered by practical men,  gives us licence to dig down and despoil our landscape in search of foreign exchange.

The Prime Minister made an important statement recently but one which I am afraid, will be ignored by the practical men of the press and the battalions of the MBAs. Mr Golding advised us to look to agriculture for our future prosperity, to seek opportunities to add value.

I have been in the Netherlands for the past six months and I cringe when I see all round me, evidence of opportunities lost by Jamaica because of the demands of practical men.

In the Amsterdam  street markets and supermarkets you will find the tubers we call coco (taro, eddo etc) which have an assured market because they are hypoallergenic food; they can be consumed by people who are allergic to all kinds of other things. Some Jamaicans call it 'hog-food'. Our practical men want to sell bananas and sugar, while the Costa Ricans, Panamanians, Moroccans, Turks and others are making lots of money selling five or six kinds of melons, pomegranates, peppers,custard apples, mangoes, pumpkins, yams and all kinds of fruit grown better and tastier in Jamaica. The mangoes and avocados are especially  pathetic. Jamaican sorrel is imported from the US.

Fifty-two years ago, in a column in Public Opinion (go look it up) I proposed that we should transform our fruit exports by ripening them in Jamaica and shipping them by air freight to pinpointed markets in Europe, getting rid of Elders & Fyffes, refrigerated steamships and ripening rooms and long distance rail and road haulage which produced wealth for English workers and merchants.

Guess what? Lots of the exquisite honeydew and other melons and other fruit on sale in Amsterdam have most of their value added where they are grown and are flown to pinpointed markets in Europe ready for consumption.

If we were to turn Trelawny's sugar estates into fruit growing cooperatives I believe we would from one parish, earn as much as all Jamaican agriculture does now.

But I said more or less the same  52 years ago. In between then and now we destroyed the JAS, the  Agricultural Extension Services, the Farm School, the Agricultural experimental stations and the idea that farming was  a means of growing wealth and building prosperous and peaceful communities.

Meanwhile the practical men tell us: forget about sports, militarise the youth and dig down the countryside.

If we had had Environmental Impact Assessments in 1972 we probably would not now be paying for the white elephant at Port Henderson. On the other hand we had EIAs in 1999 and yet we have the Doomsday Highway and pretty soon, all of Treasure Beach will be under water courtesy of the National Works Agency and NEPA..

That just tells you what is possible when the law is not a shackle!

Copyright ©2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

History is littered with treachery. In the noisome Slough of Dishonour are mired thousands of reputations, most of those who betrayed their own countries, like Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, Jonas Savimbi and Augusto Pinochet. The deepest pits though, the most purulent sinks, are reserved for those who have ranged abroad to betray and sabotage strangers, to  inflict unnecessary suffering on people who have never given them cause for complaint. People like Leopold of Belgium, Neville Chamberlain, Hitler, Ariel Sharon and George W Bush spring readily to mind.

On Monday, former President Clinton announced that he would accept an invitation from the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, of South Korea, to become the SG's personal envoy in Haiti. It is an appointment that will end in disaster.

I mention Ban Ki Moon's nationality because I believe that the disaster that already exists Haiti is the result of a culture clash which is entirely incomprehensible to most people outside the Western hemisphere and not easily understood by most people outside the international crime scene that has been created in Haiti.

Ground Zero for Modern Civilisation

 

It is my contention that the modern world was born in Haiti.

 When you understand that the modern rotary  printing press is a direct descendant of mills made to grind sugar you may begin to get the drift of my argument. Since I am not a historian my arguments will not be subtle and nuanced. I am simply presenting a few crude facts which, however you interpret them, will I believe lead inexorably to the conclusion that modern ideas of liberty and freedom, modern capitalism and globalisation of production and exchange, would have spent much longer in gestation had it not been for the black slaves of Haiti who abolished slavery and  the slave trade. In the process they defeated the armies of the leading world powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,, destroyed French empire in the western hemisphere, doubled the size and power of the United States and incidentally promoted the European sugar beet industry and revolutionised European farming.

The problem with all this, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is that had the Haitians been ethnically European their achievements would now suffuse the world narrative; conversely, had Spartacus been black, he would long ago have faded into the mists of barbarian myth.

The Haitians and all the other blacks of the Western hemisphere were uprooted from their native grounds, their civilisations laid waste, and they themselves transported to unknown lands in which they were forced to create unexampled riches and luxury for their rapists and despoilers.

For reasons lost to history, the blacks in Haiti and Jamaica were, for most of their captivity, the most unwilling subjects and continued to fight for their freedom for more than three centuries.

The Enlightenment and its prophets and philosophers popularised the ideas of freedom and liberty, the rights of man. Nowhere was freedom taken more seriously than by the Haitians, who, described as Frenchmen, fought valiantly for American freedom in that nation's  Revolutionary War of Independence. When Revolution convulsed France in turn, the Haitians threw their support to those they thought were fighting for freedom. When that proved a false trail, the Haitians  continued to fight, defeating the French, British and Spanish armies sent to re-enslave them.

Although the Americans and the French said they believed in freedom, they formed an unholy combination to restrict Haiti's liberty. THe fact of Haitian freedom frightened the Americans and other world powers. Haiti promised freedom to any captive who set foot on her soil and armed, provisioned and supplied trained soldiers to Simon Bolivar for the liberation of South America.  Nearly 200 years before the United Nations (and France and the USA),  Haiti proclaimed Universal Human Rights, threatening the slave societies in America and the Caribbean

Haiti's freedom was compromised by French and American financial blackmail, and as I've said before, what the Atlantic powers could not achieve by force of arms they achieved by compound interest. Haiti was the first heavily indebted poor country, and the United States, Canada, France and the multilateral financial organisations, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank  and the IMF have worked hard to keep her in that bondage.

Eventually, 93 years ago, the Americans invaded Haiti, destroyed the constitution, the government and their social system. American Jim Crow segregation and injustice destroyed the Haitian middle-class, enhanced and exacerbated class distinctions and antagonisms and left Haiti a ravaged, dysfunctional mess, ruled by a corrupt American trained military in the interest of a small corrupt gang of mainly expatriate or white capitalists, ready to support any and every murderous dictator who protected their interests.

Finally, twenty years ago, the Haitians rose up and overthrew the Duvaliers and the apprentice dictators who followed. In their first free election the Haitians elected a little, black parish priest, the man whose words and spirit had embodied their struggle. But the real rulers of Haiti, the corrupt, bloodthirsty capitalists with their American passports and their bulletproof SUV's, had no intention of letting Haitians exercise the universal human rights their leaders had proclaimed two centuries before.

When Jean Bertrand Aristide was deposed after a few months in office it was with the help of the CIA, USAID, and other American entities. Then ensued one of the most disgraceful episodes in the long unsavoury history of diplomacy. Bill Clinton – elected President promising to treat the Haitian refugees as human beings – elected instead to observe the same barbarous policies as George Bush I, and when the refugees became a flood Clinton's answer was more illegality. He parked two massive floating slave barracoons in Kingston Harbour where refugees picked up in Jamaican waters were, with the craven connivance of the Patterson government – denied asylum, captured and  processed and 22% of them selected for the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp while the rest were returned to their murderers in Haiti.

Eventually, largely due to pressure from black pressure groups in the US and crucially, a fast to the death begun by Randall Robinson, Clinton agreed to restore Aristide while General Colin Powell talked grandly of the soldier's honour he shared with Haiti's then murderer in chief, a scamp called Raoul Cedras.

President Clinton made several pledges to Aristide and to Haiti, but history does not seem to record that any were kept.

Had even a few been kept,  Haiti may have been able to guarantee public security and to  instal some desperately needed infrastructure. Instead Haitians are still scooping water to drink from potholes in the street and stave off hunger with 'fritters' made from earth and cooking fat.

The Haitian Army, the most corrupt and evil public institution in the western hemisphere was abolished by Aristide, to the displeasure of the North American powers. Now that the Americans have deposed Aristide for the  second time, security is in the hands of a motley mercenary army, a UN peacekeeping force.

Security in Haiti is so good that three years ago, the then head of this force, a Brazilian general was found shot to death after a friendly chat with Haitian elites.

The rapes, massacres, disappearances and kidnappings continue unabated and the only popular political force, the Fanmi Lavalas, has been effectively neutered.

President Clinton "will aim to attract private and government investment and aid for the poor Caribbean island nation, according to Clinton's office and a senior U.N. official.

"A U.N. official said that Clinton would act as a "cheerleader" for the economically distressed country, cajoling government and business leaders into pouring fresh money into a place that is largely dependent on foreign assistance. "

It all sounds so nice and cosy, a poor, black 'hapless' nation under the tutelage of the rich and civilised of the earth.

I am prepared to bet that neither Haitian democracy nor Bill Clinton's reputation will survive this appointment. Democracy is impossible without popular participation and decision making.

 In Haiti democracy  is impossible without Lavalas and Aristide

If Haiti itself is to survive, the UN General Assembly needs to seize this baton from the spectacularly unqualified and ignorant Security Council and its very nice and affable Secretary General, even less attuned to Haitian reality than the last SG, Kofi Annan and his accomplices, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, P.J. Patterson and Patrick Manning.

Dual citizenship and Parliament

 

The laws of Jamaica are apparently being rewritten behind our backs. As I understand the Representation of the People Act, if only one person is nominated on Nomination Day, that person is automatically elected to parliament.

 

There is no need for a bye-election, and it would seem to me that it is illegal to have a bye-election when there is a lawfully nominated and elected MP. No court can declare a seat vacant except under certain specific circumstances.

 

The North East St Catherine seat cannot legally be vacant. A grant of poll resulted in one valid nomination. The seat was therefore filled by Phyllis Mitchell.

 

Can anyone explain when the law was changed?

 

 

Copyright ©2009 John Maxwell

 

jankunnu@gmail.com

 

John Maxwell

I was a reporter in parliament half a century ago when Norman Manley shepherded through the House, the bill to create the College of Arts, Science and Technology. CAST, now the University of Technology (UTECH) was the intellectual godchild of people as various as Manley, members of the Legislative Council including my own father, and before them Marcus Garvey and others who had for years agitated for a University of Jamaica. The university was a plank in the first PNP Plan for Progress in 1958, At the time the CAST was being debated, the Opposition JLP was waging a campaign which proclaimed: "Saltfish better than education."

The Opposition opposed among other things,  the government's secondary scholarship programme allowing thousands of poor children to go to places like Jamaica College and Munro. The money would have better been spent on food subsidies, they said.  A few years later the same arguments were used to oppose the building of the National Stadium. This opposition was given a macabre twist on the first Independence Day when one Edward Seaga, then minister in charge of the celebrations, attempted to eject Norman Manley from the Royal Box in the Stadium he built.

"What is that man doing here?" he shouted, only to be slapped down by the new Prime Minister, Alexander Bustamante, who had a somewhat clearer idea of Jamaican history than Seaga.

With all this in the background you may imagine my shock at the attempt this week by the UTECH to capture the Trelawny stadium for its campus. 'If we don't get the stadium, UTECH whines piteously, you will be denying 5,000 children the chance to get an MBA or some other meaningless decoration stamped out by the academic mill.

I don't mean that degrees are meaningless, simply that bean-counters in academe have no more right to design the future of this country than anyone else. We can be sure of one thing: of the 5,000 new graduates few if any will have degrees in agronomy, nursing, or any of the practical skills we most urgently require for real development rather than the construction of elegant Ponzi schemes and other scams.

 

 

Rooted in Community

 

When I first settled in Kingston as a new boy at Calabar High School, schools of all kinds were well rooted in their communities. Many Calabar boys came from Jones Town, now destroyed by politically manipulated gangsterism. Wolmers and the North Street schools, St George's and Kingston College, recruited many of their scholars from places like Kingston Gardens and Allman Town.

What was very striking in those days was the fact that almost every school including the elementary  – primary and/or all age – had its own playing field and most offered a variety of outdoor activities, from Scouting and the Cadet Corps to the more usual cricket and football. Calabar and JC offered swimming.

Calabar and Jamaica College both boasted two full-sized sports fields. Between the `jewish cemetery on Slipe `Pen Road and Torrington bridge there were four big playing fields, Chetolah Park,(school) and facilities owned by the Jamaica Public Service Company, the Jamaica Fruit and Shipping Company and another whose name escapes me. Off South Camp Road there were Issa Park and Hannasons among others while Wembley, Lucas and Kensington Clubs served Eastern Kingston. And there were others, all over.

When boys left school many went straight into the world of sporting clubs, playing Minor Cup and Senior Cup cricket or Senior League football. There was a staggering variety of sporting competitions for all ages, inter-schools, inter- and infra-parish and for those who couldn't manage those there was  Business House football and cricket.

 We were a very fit nation, even if many were under-nourished, and given the leadership we had, we thought we would soon fix that.

Instead, after independence the idea gained impetus that property speculation was the essence of development.

Even the schools got into the act. KC captured the Melbourne Cricket Club grounds and many of the rest went either for campuses or for housing development. Green Kingston became increasingly brown and the peace of the city disappeared increasingly  into purpose-built ghettoes, armed to the teeth and ready to rumble.

Jamaican development has tended to be based more and more on the principle that schoolchildren don't vote, and while statistics attest to the building of more schools, these schools have become incubators for ghetto warriors, soulless deep-litter chicken coops  with the minimum space and time for play.

In the late 70s, when the Cavaliers filter plant (at Cross Roads) fell into disuse, as chairman of the NRCA I proposed to Kingston's Mayor George Mason that one or two of the filter beds be transformed into municipal swimming pools, partly to take the place of the no longer sanitary beaches in Kingston Harbour and the broken down Bournemouth Baths. The KSAC would have none of it. Seven Olympic Games later they are still idle, and boys and girls who might have been world famous are busy firing guns at each other or pushing up buttercups in May Pen cemetery.

Counterbalance for justice

The Chinese donation of the new stadium in Trelawny was rightly welcomed by many as an essential sports centre in the west, counterbalancing the admittedly inadequate facilities in Kingston,  and especially useful for the development of athletics and other sports for the deprived schools west of Ocho Rios and Old Harbour. Jarrett Park has always been totally inadequate and never more plainly so than when there is more than one major sporting activity in progress in Jamaica at any time.

Norman Manley thought that education, encompassing sports and music as well as book learning was the essential factor in civilisation. As an athlete and sportsman himself, he could never have conceived of sports, music or academic learning being in competition.

I believe, as the true father of UTECH, Norman Manley would have been outraged at the suggestion that his foundation should be used to destroy a nascent engine of Jamaica's sporting development. To justify the cuckoo's nest initiative we use the argument used against Hope Gardens: it isn't being properly used!

Whose fault is that?

Our children are to be punished for our delinquencies.

That is real Jamaican justice!

 

What outrages me is that the UTECH initiative is simply the latest bureaucratic assault on the Jamaican  people's rights to recreational facilities – by institutions who can see development only in terms of balance sheets. The wholesale assault on the beaches of Jamaica by the Urban Development Corporation and by private interests is a similar major act of treason against the public interest. The assaults on Hope Gardens and Long Mountain are elements of the same parasitic mind-set.

It may be useful to remember that while we need playing fields and organised facilities for recreation, rebellions and insurrections create their own open spaces and do not require nor demand planning permission.

Copyright©2009John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

On my return in 1971 from five years exile in England my friends seemed to think I needed to be re-introduced to Jamaica.

They were right. My first shock was downtown Kingston, which resembled parts of Berlin as it was then. In 1966, when I went to Berlin, there were huge gaps in the cityscape caused by Allied military action – by aircraft or tanks during the Second World War.

Kingston's wounds were caused by friendly fire, the work of the misnamed Ministry of Development and Welfare and the equally oxymoronic Urban Development Corporation.

Between them, forty years ago, they were going to turn Kingston into a tropical Miami with all mod cons. Instead of proceeding one building or one block at a time, Mr Edward Seaga and Mr Moses Matalon were going to transform the city, overnight. Boom! Another one gone!

As we drove through the silent ruins of Port Royal Street, ~Harbour Street, Rumbo Lane, Little Port Royal Street and South Street, something strange began to happen. Whenever we stopped the car  by some derelict building so that I could try to envisage what had been, suddenly into the headlights erupted hordes of little boys, scuttling like rats or cockroaches in every direction, running as fast as their meagre legs would carry them.

"Why are they running?" I asked.

"They think we're the police, come to catch them and beat them up."

This was new to me. I had written a great deal about police brutality before being forced to take my talents elsewhere, but I hadn't heard, till then, of the police hunting children.

About three years later, when Mr Eli Matalon was Minister of National Security, I embarrassed him and Michael Manley's government by asking the Minister on television, what he planned to do with the dozens of children then being brutalised  in police lock-ups. He said he wasn't aware of that situation. When I provided him with some facts about the police lockup a couple of hundred yards from the JBC studios – "the Black Hole of Halfway Tree" –  he promised to get the children out of the lock-ups.  A few years later, again on TV, I asked the then Minister of Youth and Community Development, Douglas Manley the question I'd asked Matalon. He actually had been moving children out of lockups and into places of safety. The problem was that the system had not been designed to deal with 'trickle-down' development.

The police fish-pots kept trapping the small fry.

Sexual Predators?

Two weeks ago, the Miami Herald carried one of the saddest stories I've ever read.

It begins:

" At age 7, Gabriel Myers was already well on his way to becoming a sexual predator.

'He had exposed himself to classmates. He had kissed another boy. And his uncle warned child-welfare administrators Gabriel had described what he wanted to do with several little girls at his Christian private school.

'Gabriel, who may himself have been sexually molested by another boy in Ohio before moving to South Florida, had been on several strong psychiatric drugs before he hanged himself last week at a Margate foster home. "

One of the Herald's readers posted a comment that expressed much of what I felt when I read the story –

"Shame on The Miami Herald for allowing this defamatory piece of trash to post. This poor child who was utterly failed by most if not all in his life is now being further victimized in his death. This disgusts me and I will cancel my subscription. We treat animals more humanely than you have this child. I hope you will write more to uncover what travesty lead to this untimely death which I would hardly term a suicide. A child who has barely been on this earth a few years and was in the care of the state for less than a year is tragically gone due to circumstances that were not at all within his control. You have left me angered and disappointed ."

Another wrote:

"Wow. So, a seven year old child "kills himself" after behaving in a manner strongly suggestive of severe abuse ... and the Miami Herald devotes an entire article to the most salacious details of the kid's sexual misbehavior? A molested seven year old's 'suicide' is mentioned once -- as a small-print caption, no less -- though there's somehow enough article space to reference his "list of touchable classmates" twice?

"This is sensationalistic journalism at its absolute sickest. You are preying on a dead child to drum up web traffic. "

The Los Angeles Times in June last year reported

"Police said the women routinely beat the boy, [the child of one of them] forced him to put his hands on a hot stove, burned his body and genitals with cigarettes and often would not let him eat or drink.

'At a news conference Friday, LAPD Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell said that because of the burns from the stove, the boy no longer can open his hands.

Lt. Vincent Neglia of the LAPD's Abused Child Unit said in a statement Saturday that the abuse was "akin to a level of torture we hope our military personnel would never encounter."

Three weeks ago the Times of London reported

"An 11-year-old boy was left fighting for his life and his 9-year-old friend was found bleeding from head to toe after being attacked and tortured by other children. The boys’ attackers demanded mobile phones, money and trainers. When they refused they were said to have been burnt with cigarettes, cut with a knife and beaten with bricks. Two boys aged 10 and 11 have been arrested."

The Infinite evil of Infants

Fifty years ago, after completing her masterwork, "My Mother Who Fathered Me", Edith Clarke began research into social conditions in the slums of Kingston. She hadn't been able to complete the research for lack of funds, but she was uncovering a toxic stew of sexual and other physical abuse of girls and boys, mainly by itinerant 'stepfathers'.

It is of course almost impossible to get any reliable estimates of violence against children and young people especially since the victimisation of boys is concealed by homophobia and other fundamentalist lunacies. It is suggestive however, that one survey carried out in relation to campaigns against HIV, found that in the parish of St Ann 16 percent, more than one in six teenage boys had contemplated or attempted suicide. In the case of girls one Caribbean victimization survey revealed that 48 percent of adolescent girls’ sexual initiation was “forced” or “somewhat forced” in nine Caribbean countries (Halcon et al., 2003).

People like those who drafted our latest sexual offences act appear to believe, like their cohorts all over the Christian world, that children are born evil and are simply awaiting the opportunity to demonstrate their satanic proclivities.

In Britain a few months ago, the case of "Baby P"  – horrifically mistreated to death –created a huge stink, eventually resolved by finding a convenient scapegoat, the head of children's services in the London borough of Haringey.

She was named, shamed and fired, but the real author of the scandal is even now being honored – Margaret Thatcher who, with Ronald Reagan, led the western world into its terminal heresy – "there is no such thing as society" and the idea that government is the problem, never the solution. The social workers have never been given the resources they need and in places like Miami, the state transfers its responsibilities to private, so called non-profit enterprises whose humanity is expressed in religious education and  prescription psychotropic drugs

To these bozos and their acolytes like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the real problem is the sturdy beggars who won't work and expect the world to take care of them.

Their principals, salting away their ill gotten gains in Cayman, Bermuda and similar criminal laundromats, , refuse to pay even the derisory flat taxes imposed by people like Mr Patterson, considering it outrageous that they  be asked to contribute to the common good in some proportion to the profits they have gained from exploiting cheap labour and turning human beings into units of human resources'.

The medieval poor laws were in some ways in advance of modern capitalist behaviour. Although "sturdy beggars" could be jailed, whipped and even hanged, the society recognised that there was a case to be made to help those who could not help themselves.

In our societies. it is simpler to warehouse in prison,  half a million  black, poor, handicapped or otherwise 'sub-normal' people and to dose their women and children with psychotropic drugs to keep them from breaching the peace.

At the age of seven, little Gabriel Myers opted out.

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

John Maxwell

Way back in the age of Dinosaurs, when I was a young reporter at the Gleaner, I sometimes found myself sidetracked in my research in the newspaper's 'morgue' where dusty volumes of old newspapers told the Gleaner's version of Jamaica's history. I worked alongside of some of the reporters who had reported that history, names well-known then, forgotten now: Martin (M.A.G.S) Smith, Vincent Truman who went to jail and nearly took me with him, Ulric Simmonds, C.T. Walters, Calvin Bowen and the imperturbable Percy Trottman. Over a drink some almost incredible stories came out, which is how I happened on the story of the racehorse's egg.

 

A shaggy horse story

 

Somewhere in the mid-1930s a very plausible con-man found on a beach somewhere, a beautiful sea-stone, weighing several pounds and perfectly egg-shaped. There had to be some higher purpose to this stone than decorating a beach,  and with a little careful thought he divined exactly what that purpose was. And that insight led almost inexorably to his facing a charge of obtaining money by false pretences and a spell as the guest of HM George VI in the St Catherine District prison.

Our con-man had found – somewhere in Vere, Clarendon – an Indian gentleman, who was well off and ready to bet on anything. The con-man approached him in confidence with the story that Jamaica's leading racehorse had recently laid an egg and the con-man had at great danger and expense, managed to posses himself of said egg. Would the Indian gentleman care to buy a share in the egg?  To ensure confidentiality the con-man insisted that the egg needed to be incubated by a human being so that when the young racehorse hatched, no one else would know whence it came and it could go on to win races and money for the proud owners.

I promise you I'm not making this up.

After the Indian gentleman and his wife had spent some months taking turns carefully incubating the egg as instructed, they confidently expected to be the proud foster parents of a young thoroughbred. When said thoroughbred did not emerge and the con-man could no longer be found, they set about the egg hoping to free the young racehorse. After tentative tapping produced no result   they went at the egg hammer and tongs, discovering eventually, that the egg was solid rock.

The cops were summoned and in due course the case was before the courts.

I am reminded of the Racehorse Egg by the saga of the Falmouth Cruise Ship port which we are told, will bring floods of day-trippers to Falmouth, rendering that beautiful old town totally unfit for human habitation.

Jamaica, it seems, needs a designated super-borrower, an entity whose duty is to ensure that Jamaica is as financially over-extended as possible, no doubt to prevent hostile take-over bids from Cayman or Bermuda. In the 70s and 80s this function was admirably discharged by the UDC who issued IOUs and other promissory notes to banks all over. Now, the UDC having run out of steam, its labours have been assumed by the Port Authority of Jamaica, which, like the UDC, seems to have been called by God to perform plastic surgery on the geography of Jamaica.

It was the UDC we need to remember, that by sanitising the Negril Morass, is mainly responsible for the current vulnerability of the Morass to destructive fires and for the erosion of most of Negril's  famous seven mile beach.

The  NRCA advised by the scientists of the NRCD, told the UDC 30 years ago what was likely to happen, but the UDC, like the PAJ today, knows better than any number of ecological scientists  and 'over-educated Rasta' environmentalist activist journalists.

As Mr Moses Matalon pointed out to me: "Mr Maxwell you are not an engineer" and he was deeply hurt when I retorted by pointing out that neither was he.

I am sure Mr Tony Hylton will tell me the same thing. He is about to build a $200 US Million dollar port at Falmouth which is fated to be a disaster even more spectacular than the Doomsday Highway.

Mr Hylton probably knows more about investment finance than Mr Warren Buffet, who is either the world's richest man or its second richest. Mr Buffet thinks the world financial system is going to be in turmoil for some time to come. Mr Hylton does not think so.

Mr Hylton has tied the Port Authority's fortunes to those of the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines which is aiming to be one of Jamaica's leading competitors as a destination.

Royal Caribbean is largely owned by the Pritzker family, who have got inordinately  rich by the simple expedient of paying little or no tax on their considerable earnings.

Royal Caribbean continues the Pritzker's  voracious appetite for money by transforming itself from a cruise line to a floating destination. You read that right.

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, water sports, 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.

RCCL had a dreadful year last year and this year found its bonds reduced to junk rating and it was unable to find money to finance its half-built new destination/liner. The line has been rescued by the Finnish shipyard and the Finnish government who were already in the hole for hundreds of millions and figured that they might as well throw good money after bad because it would cost even more to scrap a half built cruise ship. If they completed the ship someone might buy it for a hotel.

 

Running Aground

 

Mr Hylton's vision of paradise for Falmouth is that the classic Georgian town will be reduced to an American style theme park, a la "Colonial Williamsburg" for the exclusive use of the cruise ship passengers and people with foreign credit cards. For this he is putting Jamaica in debt for between 100 and 200 million US with no guarantee that this investment will ever be repaid. One wonders what this money would return if it were invested in small farms, small business and in education. Instead, those whose education and skill-building could have been paid for by this money, will slave until their children's children's generation to pay for Mr Hylton's vision.

 

Falmouth will become a cultural and financial free-zone, owing no allegiance to Jamaica and paying a modicum of tax, since offshore banks will find happy havens here, to provide temporary landing pads for foreign currency on its way to its natural habitat - offshore.

But I have news for Mr Hylton. Falmouth is the estuary of the Martha Brae and the Martha Brae brings down millions of tons of silt every year. The Oasis of the Seas is going to run aground regularly in Falmouth unless the harbour is regularly dredged at great expense  . And dredging, of course, is one of the Port Authority's areas of expertise with its Belgian partners who triumphantly relocated millions of tons of Kingston Harbour's toxic waste for the greater good of Portmore.

As I pointed out in a column in February 2002, (People at Risk):

"… persistent organic pollutants (POPs) or Persistent Bio-accumulative Toxics (PBT's) remain in the environment for decades, even centuries in some cases and travel far beyond their initial points of release. And as long as they exist, they accumulate in the bodies of animals and people.

"The Port Authority admits that the toxics in Kingston Harbour include (among others) : Arsenic, Benzene, Cadmium, Chlordane, Chloroform, Chromium, Cresols, 2,4-D9 (aka Agent Orange) dichlorobenzene, dichlorethane, dinitrotoluene, Endrin, Heptachlor, Hexachlorobutadiene, lead, lindane, mercury, nitrobenzene, pentachlorophenol, pyridine, selenium, tetrachloroethylene, toxaphene , 4,5 Trichlorophenol and vinyl chloride.

"Many PBTs are associated with a range of adverse human health effects, including damage to nervous systems and deformities of the sex organs and reproductive systems generally and associated developmental problems, cancer, plus genetic impacts. They not only deform people now living, but may deform people not yet conceived.  Particular risks may be posed to the developing fetus or young child where critical organs, such as the central nervous system and the reproductive system, are under development. "

Since the Port Authority did not bother to address my concerns then I have no doubt that they will ignore them now. And when I look back at what I warned the UDC about at Negril, and my prediction of the financial and ecological disaster that is the Millennium Highway, I cannot help but wonder why I don't find some racehorse eggs to sell our Jamaican ginnigogs. And I remember that classic line in the 1954 World Bank Report on Jamaica: In practice, absolute ownership in Jamaica means the absolute right of the owner to ruin the land in his own way.

 

Haiti Elections and Persistent Journalistic Falsehoods

The Vichy-water government of Haiti purported to hold elections for the Senate a few days ago.

The results were disappointing and the free press of the western world reported it this way:

 

No winners in 1st round of Haiti Senate election,

said AP and their approach was typical

No obvious winner in Haiti's Senate poll

No clear winners in Haiti Senate elections

No winners emerge from Senate elections in Haiti; June runoff set

Reading these headlines would never lead you to suspect that there was in fact a very clear winner in the elections.

 

 The Fanmi Lavalas, loyal to President Aristide, advised Haitians to stay away from the polls, because it refused to accept the corrupt machinations of the electoral authority. The authority had tried to sabotage the candidacy of the Fanmi Lavalas.

SO Lavalas told the Haitians to boycott the elections. Only about one in ten turned up to vote according to the authorities.

 Lavalas says the real turnout was less than one percent.

That would seem to indicate a landslide win for Lavalas. If there was no clear winner there was certainly a clear loser: the Elite-American-Canadian-French-UN occupation authorities

The Haitian people clearly passed a massive vote of no confidence in the whole fraudulent Vichy-water mess. The free press, of course, has other ideas and its own Democratic agenda.

Copyright©2009 John Maxwell

Please Note; I am not a member of Facebook or Twitter or ANY OTHER social networking site. If you see me listed there it is some kind of fraud. Pay no attention. JM

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

In my teenage years, my stepfather used to buy Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post, I bought Newsweek and occasionally TIME, and those magazines formed for a little while, my window into the modern world. I was never as credulous as my contemporaries and my faith in TIME and Newsweek began to fray with their reporting of the clash between Peron and La Prensa in Argentina. It disappeared almost entirely the first time I read a report in those magazines allegedly about Jamaica. These doubts came flooding back half a century later when I tried to find an address in Managua, Nicaragua. It went something like this: Third house on the left on the second road on the right next to the Esso gas Station on the road by the zoo.

Having read TIME I was expecting a city more advanced that Kingston. Instead I found a ramshackle Spanish Town Road-like  mess in which hundreds of thousands of miserable people had contributed to the grandeur alleged in stories in the North American media.

In 1964, promised an interview with Papa Doc, I flew into Haiti, seeing the environmental divide between brown Haiti and green Santo Domingo, a line discovered anew by every foreign journalist since and attributed to Haitian poverty and desperation instead of to the rightful authors, the Americans who strip-mined  Haiti's economy  flat in in search of  riches in the twenty years  after 1915. It was smash and grab colonialism.

It bequeathed to Haiti the barebacked mountains, dried riverbeds, broken streets, pitiful water supply, grinding poverty and misery caused by a century of economic blackmail by France and the US but even now blamed on Aristide – who was actually born into these conditions and determined to change them.

It is almost guaranteed that most contemporary reports on Haiti range from seriously inaccurate to biased to outright lies. This is especially so when they speak Of the 'radical slum priest' turned President, and who 'fled amid a popular revolt". These keywords tell you that you are reading propaganda intended to continue and enhance a two hundred year old programme of defamation officially begun as a counter-attack by the nascent American Republic on the idea of universal human rights promulgated by the brand new, black republic of Haiti. That sentence does sound bizarre, doesn't it?

It appears to contradict everything you've learned about the Enlightenment, the Rights of Man and the American and French Revolutions. It was that great democrat, Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence who, In the Preamble to his original draft of the Declaration wrote:

“      We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable …"  And it was he also who wrote about slavery, "We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." And finally, it was Jefferson who, seeing whites and blacks as two distinct nations whose natural relationship was one of war, believed that if slavery was abolished the blacks would rebel due to the long years of intense and cruel oppression. He anticipated racial war if free blacks and whites were not segregated into disparate countries.

SO, while Haiti supplied many if not most of the so-called French soldiers to beat back the British in the American war of Independence, when those blacks defeated Napoleon in their own country,  ceasing  to be French and becoming "Ayisien" – Haitian – they took on a new colour and a new menace. IF they could beat the French twice and the British and the Spaniards – a Royal Flush of 19th century imperial power – what wickedness were they not capable of?

Henri Christophe who fought for the Americans at Savannah and Yorktown, became labeled, two decades later, with a demoniac personality, a blood-sipping cannibal to be reincarnated two centuries later   both as Duvalier and as the anti-Duvalier and  as the Catholic Priest Aristide. It was a bonus that Jean-Bedel Bokassa dictator of the Central African Republic (CAR) was also libelously accused of cannibalism. It may have been these propaganda coincidences that persuaded the CIA, as innocent as ever, to arrange the 'extraordinary rendition' of President and Mme Aristide to the CAR, hoping no doubt,  that there just might be a real cannibal in Bangui who could accept the Aristides as a 'bonne bouche' from their friends in Washington.

 

Bloodsucking

 

The new American republic felt itself threatened by Haiti, which offered freedom to anyone fleeing from slavery and oppression, and armed and provisioned Bolivar to liberate Spanish America and free the slaves. That alone provoked the idea of an embargo against the Haitians. They needed to sell their sugar to new markets, since France refused to trade with its former colony. The Americans said they would recognise Haitian independence whenever France did, giving France the opportunity for the biggest and most evil act of extortion in human history.

The enormity of the blackmail was breathtaking. France demanded that Haiti pay an indemnity of 150 million French francs – equivalent to nearly US $22 billion in 2004. The ransom was equivalent to France's entire annual budget or ten times the annual GDP of Haiti at its productive best. The French not only extracted a pound of flesh, they took an enormous volume of blood with it.

The first installment – arranged by the French – was for a French bank to lend Haiti the money. The bank deducted management fees and interest up front, so that when the installment was paid to the French it was still 6 million francs short.

The injustice of the arrangement may be further judged  by the fact that France's Western design, frustrated by the loss of Haiti, meant that all the French territory below Canada became surplus to requirements. This area, known as Louisiana, was 74 times the area of Haiti, larger than the then United States itself and was bought by President Jefferson for less than half the French demanded from Haiti in Blood Money.

The major effect was the permanent economic and social distortion and stunting of Haitian life and freedom largely due to the imposition of draconian measures to repay the debt. The main measure was the so-called "Rural Code".

J. Damu, writing on the issue reported:

[According to} " Haitian First Lady Mildred Aristide's account in her book, "Child Domestic Service in Haiti and its Historical Underpinnings," the Rural Code laid the basis for the legal apartheid between rural and urban society in Haiti. With the Rural Code, the economically dominant class of merchants, government officials and military officers who lived in the cities legally established themselves as Haiti's ruling class.

"Under the Rural Code agricultural workers were chained to the land and allowed little or no opportunity to move from place to place. Socializing was made illegal after midnight, and the Haitian farmer who did not own property was obligated to sign a three-, six- or nine-year labor contract with a large property owner. The code also banned small-scale commerce, so that agricultural workers would produce crops strictly for export.

The Haitian Rural Code was all embracing, governing the lives not only of farmers but of children as well.

The Rural Code was specifically designed to regulate rural life in order to more efficiently produce export crops with which to pay the indemnity.

The taxes levied on production were also used predominantly to pay the indemnity and not to build schools nor to provide other social services to the generators of this great wealth, the peasants."

The debt was finally paid off in 1947, 122 years after its imposition.

Between independence in 1804 and Jean Bertrand Aristide's accession to office in 1990 a grand total of 32 high schools were built in Haiti. Under Aristide more than 200 were built, mostly in the countryside. When the Americans kidnapped and deported Aristide in 2004 they found quarters for the Marines by capturing Haiti's new medical school, built by Aristide and run with the help of the Cubans.

The Marines'' allies, who until a few weeks before rejoiced in the name "the Cannibal Army", destroyed all signs of cultural progress, burning down the new museum of Haitian culture and shut down the children's television.

The Canadian representative to the OAS rather gave the game away for Canada when he accompanied the American Quisling – La Tortue - on an American marine helicopter flight to the north where La Tortue and his murderous lieutenants hailed the former Cannibal Army as Freedom Fighters.

Their only role had been their usual banditry, attacking unarmed police stations in the countrtside, robbing peasants  and chopping up the  innocent cops – giving the American, Canadian British and French newspapers the right to write that the "radical slum-priest (and probable witch-doctor) had " fled amid a popular uprising"

This week, Canada's most popular newspaper the Toronto Star could say, in guilelesss innocence:

"Few countries have been hit harder than Haiti by the global economic slump, and by the sheer force of nature. Last year's hurricanes did $1 billion in damage. Remittances from Haitians working in the United States, Canada and France may drop by $250 million or more this year. And now foreign aid is in danger of drying up.

This adds up to a colossal challenge for President René Préval's government, which was democratically elected in 2006 after years of instability. Despite initial hopes, Haiti's 9 million people are struggling. Eight in 10 live on less than $2 a day. Now they face even worse hardship. The most desperate will turn to argile – patties made from clay, salt and margarine – to stave off hunger pangs. And that raises fears of food riots, soaring crime and instability."

 

There is not the slightest hint of Canada's leading and bloody role in promoting and creating those "years of instability."

Shortly after Aristide's overwhelming victory in Haiti's first democratic presidential election in 1990,  the relicts of the Jim Crow Marine occupation managed to convince the Americans, first John McCain's International Republican Institute and then elements of Bill Clinton's government and various Canadian politico and officials that Haiti under Aristide was a threat to civilisation as they knew it.

Denis Paradis, a Canadian Minister, convened a coven of like-minded fascists, as I am wont to describe them– to develop a doctrine giving civilised states the right to intervene in 'failed states' – the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine.

 

Paradis' coven then decided that Aristide must go, and the Canadians through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) among others, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and John McCain's International Republican Institute financed a whole panoply of Haitian francs tireurs, pimps and wannabe-presidents and face-card NGOs to support the programme of the elites which was simply to grab back from the Haitian people, the Universal Human Rights promulgated 200 years earlier for the first time on Earth by Jean Jacques Dessalines and the other illustrious fathers and mothers of the Haitian Revolution.

Sometimes innocence is not merely a sin but a bloody and unforgivable crime.

More next week.

Walk Good.

Copyright 2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

It is as idle to define the problems of Haiti as problems of economic development as it is to contemplate the problems of Elisabeth Fritzl as a problem of delinquent parenting.

 

It will never be possible to disentangle Elisabeth Fritzl from the treachery and cruelty of an evil and incestuous father, a man willing to steal the lives and souls of his own child and his children by her,  to suck the very breath of freedom, to steal the light and air to which they have title as human beings; to unleash even in those outsiders who have merely heard of these horrors the potential for an infinitely complex self-generating concatenation of Mandelbrot images of sheer terror which,  if we had the capacity to  pursue, would lead us down endless nights and days into a chaos of unimaginable horror.

It may be possible – with sophisticated help – for the mind of Elisabeth Fritzl to begin to repair itself and perhaps even for her children to obtain some limited version of what we call sanity. It may be possible, but not, I think in one lifetime.

 

Hold on tight to your screams !

 

Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, an otherwise excellent human being, I am sure, is among those, like the burbling boobies of the world Bank and other International Financial Agencies (IFI), who believes that what ails Haiti is simply a case of distorted economic development and that there is a simple formula to fix things. Free zone development and regular voting will be surefire cures.

 The poorest country in the Western hemisphere got that way, according to an eminent gaggle of politicians and private sector experts, by native mismanagement and the incompetence of the black Haitian population and its leaders.

Among these are such as Colin Powell, Condolleezza Rice and their advisers including the toxic spawn of Jesse Helms – Roger Noriega and Otto Reich and the International Republican Institute and before them were Thomas Jefferson who defined blacks as three fifths human and William Jennings Bryan, three times Democratic party candidate for the Presidency of The USA and who, as Secretary of State, was astonished at the pretensions of the Haitians who he saw as a bunch of "Niggers speaking French."

 There are also some people who believe that women who are raped are at least partially responsible for their own misfortunes and there are, I am sure, people who will tell you with absolute certainty, that Elisabeth Fritzl must have in some way contributed to her father's delinquency. Haiti too, conspired in its own catastrophe.

It takes two to tango, they will tell you.

 

Hold on tight to your screams !

 

In the New York Times last week Ban Ki Moon:

"Yes, Haiti remains desperately poor. It has yet to fully recover from last year’s devastating hurricanes, not to mention decades of malign dictatorship. Yet we can report what President René Préval told us: “Haiti is at a turning point.” It can slide backwards into darkness and deeper misery, sacrificing all the country’s progress and hard work with the United Nations and international community. Or it can break out, into the light toward a brighter and more hopeful future."

 

Last August the Secretary General was full of hope:

“The time has come to rebuild the institutions that have been destroyed by years of neglect, corruption and violence, to strengthen them so that the State is able to deliver the services that the people need.”

In his latest visit Ban said  "It is easy to visit Haiti and see only poverty. But when I visited recently with former President Bill Clinton, we saw opportunity.

"My special adviser on Haiti, the Oxford University development economist Paul Collier, has worked with the government to devise a strategy. It identifies specific steps and policies to create those jobs, with particular emphasis on the country’s traditional strengths — the garment industry and agriculture.…creating the sort of industrial “clusters” that have come to dominate global trade dramatically expanding the country’s export zones, so that a new generation of textile firms can invest and do business in one place. By creating a market sufficiently large to generate economies of scale, they can drive down production costs and, once a certain threshold is crossed, spark potentially explosive growth constrained only by the size of the labor pool. That may seem ambitious in a country of 9 million people, where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day and half of the food is imported. "

Can anyone really be so ill-informed? Can anyone believe that  a country of 9 million poverty stricken people living on less than $2 a day and importing half their food can generate thriving markets for anything but subsistence production?

Ban Ki Moon is our new Dr Pangloss: All is for the best in thus best of all possible worlds.

 

Hold on tight to your screams !

 

"It is easy to visit `Haiti and to see only poverty"  It probably isn’t much harder if you live there and like a parish priest named Jean Bertrand Aristide, become inflamed with the idea that you and your people are going to change things, to “build utopia on a dungheap’.

The only problem is that there are people who want Haitians to remain in the misery they have been made to embrace.

The facile American journalistic exlanations for Haiti have always been lies, launched by no less than Thomas `jefferson and sedulously cultivated by generations of racists intent on keeping Haitians in their proper place.

The Haitians were always presumptuous: two hundred years ago they fought above their weight and won, abolishing slavery, destroying France's ambitions in the New World, doubling the size of the USA and above all, being the first nation anywhere to enshrine the rights of man, woman and child, the fundamental `universal rights of human beings, in their constitution.

The almost contemparaneous American and French revolutions did not do what the Haitians did. Slavery persisted in France and in the US, and, thirty years ago the US gave up trying for an Equal Rights Amendment a few years after narrowly forcing through a voting rights act to give all Americans title to their democracy.

The Haitians were a serious threat to American slave based capitalism, promising freedom to any person who set foot in Haiti, naming a main street after John Brown and arming Simon Bolivar to go liberate latin America

Like the  Cubans a century and a half later, the Haitians needed to be contained.

The Americans and the French went about solving the Haiian problem in a very businesslike way.  The Haitians  had sugar to sell, but their only real market was the US. The US agreed with the French that they would buy nothing from the Haitians unless the French recognised Haitian independence.

This extortionate double play worked. The Haitians would starve unless they could sell their sugar.

 

Hold on tight to your screams!

 

The solution guaranteed the Haitians would starve anyway, committing themselves to pay a ransom equivalent to $120 billion US to the French, buying their freedom in cash having bought it in blood, pauperising themselves for another century.

When they defaulted – as they had to – the Americans and their accomplices intervened, seizing the Haitian Treasury and Customs services, abolishing the Haitian constitution, dive-bombing the Haitian peasants when they rose to assert their rights, stealing Haitian land, cutting down Haitian forests to plant sisal, installing a fascist army to maintain the rule of a minority, light skinned elite who despised the black Haitians upon whom they battened and fed.

 

They had great plans, the elite and their foreign friends. They were going to revolutionise pig rearing in Haiti, but first they needed to get rid of the native Haitian pigs. The experts replaced the Haitian pigs with large white hogs, pigs that needed better housing than the Haitian peasants who suposedly owed Them. The experts, in the interest of cheap food, then completed the ruin of the Haitian peasantry by importing subsidised American rice, destroying the Haitian market in hill rice.

Then, when the Haitians were once again pauperised the experts and their elite allies introduced the nearest thing to slavery known to this century  – free zones, where Haitians laboured for the price of less than one Jamaican patty a day. THe women were injected with drugs which stopped their monthly periods so they wouldn’t need time off to have babies. They were prohibited from joining unions.

 

Hold on tight to your screams!

 

This is the new dispensation.of Mr Ban ki Moon and of Mr Collier, of Mr Zoellick of the World Bank and the IDB, of Mr Kofi Annan and Mr Colin Powell, of Mr Patterson and Mr Manning.

It will be led by a most unsavoury collection of those George Soros describes as gangster capitalists, who paid for the terror that has murdered thousands, driven thousands more into exile, used rape as an instrument of political enforcement and  twice destroyed the Haitians desperate attempts to recover their rights – the rghts they were the first  in the world to proclaim,  a century before the UN, that every human beings is entitled to the same rights and privileges as every other.

 

The security situation is fixed according to Mr Ban ki Moon. Gangs of convicted and unconvicted murderers and rapists in concert with so called UN peacekeepers and child molesters will again control Haiti in the interests of the largely expatriate elite, the market makers whose older brothers have brought the world to the brink of moral and financial disaster people with the divine right to be rich and to suck the blood of the poor.

 

Haiti's democracy was beheaded in a conspiracy between the US State Department, John McCain's International Republican Institute, and the governments of France and Canada. THey shut down the development process, destroyed the nascent medical school, blocked Haitian access to clean water. In an initiative reminiscent of King Leopold's intervention in the Congo a century ago – a kind of mission of the Red Cross as Leopold described it, they set back development in Haiti by half a century. They didn't kill quite as many people as Leopold.

 

Hold on tight to your screams!

 

The poor, as Condolleezza Rice points out, can always vote.

 It won’t do them much good but will provide western journalists with a deep sense of smug self-satisfaction.

Meanwhile to Elisabeth Fritzl and the Haitians we can say :

Hold on tight to your screams!

One day, somebody may hear them.

They may not know what they mean – but they may make a paragraph in the New York Times.

Copyright ©2009 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com