Mango Walk

 

it's called a bridle path but you must walk

for safety's sake along the mountainside

i've never seen a person who would ride

and many a laden donkey that would balk

of going that long road of grass and chalk

look to the left and death is a quick slide

in the warm rain and plenty bush to hide

your worthless carcass and no one to talk

the map is silent on who owns the place

nor does it hymn the brightness of the green

and noisy leaves in the sun's final ray

as all is captured in transcendent grace

eyes do not understand what they have seen

and mind is turning to the coming day

shape stars in heaven no one seems to care

eyes firmly focused on the heaving mud

since each bright hope will turn out one more dud

 

exhausted haze hangs in the summer air

while the old tale now seems like so much crud

shape stars in heaven no one seems to care

 

that's the whole summary of this affair

if we are lucky we're put out to stud

if not it's down to muscle bones and blood

shape stars in heaven no one seems to care

no journey goes to ending without break

but life itself the trip that does not pause

beginning as it ends just by mistake

 

what has been given others had to take

in secret meetings and to no applause

no journey goes to ending without break

 

but you must know just what we now forsake

in order to achieve your sacred cause

beginning as it ends just by mistake

 

yet leaving only horror in its wake

and showing all the marks of tiger claws

no journey goes to ending without break

 

but at its start there always is an ache

within the mind that recognizes flaws

beginning as it ends just by mistake

 

from this condition nothing we can shake

except the present and the final laws

no journey goes to ending without break

beginning as it ends just by mistake

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.

 

 

a fairy circle where no fairies went

on dew-wet hillside in the still-grey light

a youthful mind gives meaning to the sight

but older heart recalls and is content

merely to pause and let the eye's descent

on harsher images and recent blight

blot out that peace still the calm old forthright

urgings of memory will not relent

now golden mushroom at the porch's end

in northern morning brings back younger days

a world adjacent just beyond the veil

so wait to see what messages they send

while the sun rises to its noontime blaze

and all the forest seems now to exhale

this is the point where truth turns into pain

but you can't flinch that choice was long since made

so there's no option left but fold and fade

that's the old story there simple and plain

you can't hold back either the sun or rain

but must peel off in time from the parade

return to starting point in the dim shade

straight to the place that none can ascertain

when the call comes we cannot keep back tears

although we know just what we will be told

time has its way of fading out the line

and making us forget the many years

that pass and vanish into the long cold

journey that leads towards the last incline

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

strange that the monster is not some wild beast

but kind-faced human with a ready smile

ready to welcome victims to the feast

 

not as the guests but to be tied and fleeced

surprised they were so easy to beguile

strange that the monster is not some wild beast

 

as in the stories told in the warm east

simple in form but so complex in style

ready to welcome victims to the feast

 

in such a form they think they'll be released

if they'll just come and wait a little while

strange that the monster is not some wild beast

 

but looks so gentle with face lined and creased

by age and weather absent of all bile

ready to welcome victims to the feast

 

as if he were some calm presiding priest

whose attitude is wholly versatile

strange that the monster is not some wild beast

ready to welcome victims to the feast

this single purpose is one most unfair

to take us out and take away our pride

leaving us nothing but this naked hide

for those who rule to laugh and prod and stare

declaring the delight to be most rare

and our request for some relief denied

the better for a young fool to deride

just how we shiver in the nighttime air

we have to laugh since that way we get paid

the pittance you believe we most deserve

for making this whole scene the sort of show

to compensate the pain that will abrade

the strength of mastery and must unnerve

even the ones who truly fail to know

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