Mango Walk

 

JOHN MAXWELL Sunday, November 02, 2008

 

John McCain's real problem is that if it is announced on Tuesday that he has won the election for the presidency of the United States, nobody will believe it.

Every indicator - including popular sentiment worldwide - is against him.

The huge crowds - some standing in the rain to listen to Barack Obama; the millions of poor people's dollars donated to the Obama campaign, the hundreds of thousands of volunteers for Obama, the hundreds of songs written for Obama, the number of early voters who say they have voted for Obama, and finally, the public opinion polls have embedded into the consciousness of the world the idea that Barack Obama cannot lose this election if it is conducted fairly.

The world is suspicious of John McCain and his confederates.
They, led by Rove, Cheney and Bush have so discredited the US electoral system, have so reduced US credibility over the world, that nobody really believes anything they say.

And it isn't that they are simply unbelievable, untrustworthy and full of it, they and McCain and Palin are also viewed as socially backward and behind the times, technologically advanced but culturally primitive -unrepresentative of what the world believes the real America to be.

In a world where Liberal usually means right of centre, non-Americans are astonished to hear "Liberal' launched as a cuss-word by people who believe that the world was created in seven days and that dinosaurs and humans once walked the earth at the same time.

A few days ago it was announced that Volkswagen had overtaken Exxon-Mobil as the world's most highly valued company. In a world where 'socialism' is an even more outrageous insult than 'liberal', it is startling to contemplate the fact that Volkswagen is a product of the post-war British Army of the Rhine directed by the 1945 British government of Clement Atlee- a bunch of socialist commissars who reinvented Hitler's 'People's Car' and put it on the road.

It was these same socialists who were responsible for civilising industrial relations in Germany by inventing the idea of Co-Determination, a system where the worker participates at every executive level of the German corporation and worker directors sit on corporate boards.

Co-Determination is an idea which has been so successful that it has transformed European social relations and flowered into the adoption of an EU social agenda - aimed at full employment and a more inclusive, participatory society. On December 9, 1989, the member states, with the historically ironic exception of the United Kingdom, adopted a declaration constituting the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers.

Among the areas regulated in this charter are such matters as employment and remuneration, improvement of living and working conditions, social protection, freedom of association, collective bargaining, equal treatment of men and women, industrial health, the protection of children, elderly and disabled persons; and information, consultation and participation of workers in decision-making. Most of these principles are still, in the United States, subjects of bitter dispute.

A couple of weeks ago, President Bush, in a piteous appeal for a return to the wild, begged his fellow world leaders not to abandon the principles of laissez-faire when they come to remake the world in the aftermath of the current economic meltdown and the almost inevitable social catastrophe to follow.

The next president of the United States will need to come to terms with a world which no longer works according to American principles and rules. Free trade, globalisation, and the ideas behind the multilateral agreement on investment are obsolete.

This time, as in every crisis of capitalism, the pundits are dashing to the Internet and the libraries to reread Karl Marx.
Marx was not a sentimentalist. He hated neither capitalism nor capitalists. They were objective realities and functioned according to certain principles. Capitalism was doomed to fail because of its fundamental internal contradictions - not because of the greed of its practitioners.

These contradictions include the antagonism between the social, collective nature of production on the one hand, and private ownership of the means of production on the other; and the antagonism between the world market and the limitations of the nation state. Capitalism is based on production for profit and not for social need. The working class creates new value but receives only a portion of that new value back as wages.

The capitalists take the rest - the surplus. As a result, the working class collectively cannot afford to buy back all the goods it produces. Capitalism destroys its own markets by pauperising its workers and by over-production. Marx predicted globalisation and the worldwide effects we now experience.

The opponents of socialism, the proponents of laissez-faire, tend to believe like Margaret Thatcher that "There is no such thing as society" and like Ronald Reagan that "Government is not the answer, Government is the problem." The ultra-capitalists and globalisers abhor what they call "the Nanny State" - the welfare state that attempts to guarantee a basic level of civilised existence for all.

In FA Hayek's "Road to Serfdom?" the problem is stated: "In place of individual liberty, socialism offers security. It promises protection from personal economic necessities and restraints, and an equality of economic well-being." Hayek was not a socialist.

The main architect of the latest disaster, Alan Greenspan, has proclaimed himself confounded by the turn of events. He had a set of rules which he says had always worked. Until now! He cannot understand the disaster over which he presided.

Greenspan is a disciple of Ayn Rand, one of recent history's most eminent false prophets. Rand's theory - so-called 'Objectivism' - holds that human beings must rationally be selfish, putting individual self-interest first. She therefore rejects the ethical doctrine of altruism - a moral obligation to live not only for one's self but for the sake of others. Since Rand took millions of words to define her philosophy, any summary of it is perforce crude. I do not think, however, that I have misrepresented her, or Hayek, or Greenspan, or Thatcher or Reagan or the millions of others to whom freedom is a purely personal attribute and life is every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

Some others of us think that none of us is free if any of us is unfree. The fascists believe that any sense of duty outside of self is a fetter, restricting real freedom. We believe that only by our mutual recognition of all our humanity are we human, and that our civilisation and survival depend on that. We are all in the same boat and on the same journey.

Individual liberty clearly means different things to different people. The International Republican Institute, headed by John McCain, no doubt believes that the people of Haiti are free, and free to starve to death, while the people of Cuba are enslaved by socialism, free education and the best health services in the world.

The IRI was one of the prime movers in usurping Haitian sovereignty to get rid of Jean Bertrand Aristide whom they consider a serious threat to real democracy as he was intent on building another socialist/welfare state alongside Cuba.

NAUGHT FOR THEIR COMFORT

The Gleaner on Wednesday betrayed the essentially parasitical view of imperial capitalism, when it headlined a soiree held at the Gleaner with the admonition "Look away from the USA", and reported that a number of academics and a (now obligatory) theologian were urging the government to seek financial aid from world powers other than the USA.

On Sunday last Mr Edward Seaga similarly gave his considered and equally obtuse opinion that Jamaica stood to gain nothing from either Obama or McCain.

I am not at all sure when or whether Jamaica has ever got any useful financial assistance from abroad, except in remittances sent by our own emigrants. What we have got is massive loans which have gone to pay for SUVs, foreign travel, air-conditioned garrison-townhouses and expensive white elephants such as Mr Seaga's redevelopment of downtown Kingston and the 'Doomsday Highway'. The Kingston redevelopment tore the heart out of our once fairly elegant and vibrant capital city transforming it into a tawdry, lawless, toxic disaster. The 'Doomsday Highway' is the best means yet devised for separating Jamaicans from their hard-earned pensions. Bauxite development destroyed our countryside and its communities, sending our farmers fleeing to languish on the street-corners of Birmingham and the Bronx and leaving thousands of children fatherless, hungry, illiterate and ripe for exploitation by pimps and gunmen and doomed to be brutalised, jailed or hanged for our criminal neglect.

Now, courtesy of Russian oligarchs and presidentially pardoned Swiss billionaires, we are to metastasise our bauxite disaster. This phase is really something destined to sterilise the land, destroy the landscape, the water supplies, and the culture, and to send even more peasants into exile and even more children into lives of crime and social degradation.

Additionally, by burning coal the new bauxite miracle will complete the destruction of our air quality as it destroys our water quality. In the 1960s the graffiti had it that birth control was "a plan to kill Negro". Little did the artists know about bauxite.

Now that the capitalists have established that the state - that is, us, we, the people - are the benefactors of last resort, it is time that we too discovered that truth. The billions we are spending to rescue banks and capitalists would be more efficiently and cost-effectively spent on rescuing our communities. If Obama becomes president, that is a discovery his constituents are likely to make sooner rather than later. In fact, some are already making it, demanding fundamental change and a new economic order.

The decay of imperial capitalism is bound to produce unforeseen byproducts, some beneficial, some toxic. Those who will survive need to be able to quickly choose between them.

When Jesus of Nazareth chased the moneychangers from the temple in Jerusalem he knew what he was doing. Yet, today, every Christian yearns to become a moneychanger.

Few of us recognise that our salvation is in our hands and in our lands.

But hunger is a great teacher.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

 Racism and Poverty

John Maxwell

The people of Haiti are as poor as human beings can be.

According to the statisticians of the World Bank and others who speculate about how many Anglos can dance on the head of a peon, Haiti may either be the second, third or fourth poorest country in the world.

In Haiti’s case, statistics are irrelevant.

 When large numbers of people are reduced to eating dirt – earth, clay – it is impossible to imagine poverty any more absolute, any more desperate, any more inhuman and degrading.

The chairman of the World Bank visited Haiti this past week. This man, Robert Zoellick, is an expert finance-capitalist, a former partner in the investment bankers Goldman Sachs, whose 22,000 ‘traders” last year averaged bonuses of more than $600,000 each.

Goldman Sachs paid out over &18 billion in bonuses to its traders last year, about 50% more than the GDP of Haiti’s 8 million people.

The chairman of Goldman took home more than $70 million and his lieutenants – as Zoellick once was – $40 million or more, each.

It should be clear that someone like Robert Zoellick is likely to be totally bemused by Haiti when his entertainment allowance could probably feed the entire population for a day or two. It is not hard to understand that Mr Zoellick cannot understand why Haiti needs debt relief.

Haiti is now forced by the World Bank and Its bloodsucking siblings like the IMF, to pay more than $1 million a week to satisfy debts incurred by the Duvaliers and the post-Duvalier tyrannies. Haiti must repay this debt to prove its fitness for ‘help’ from the Multilateral Financial Institutions (MFI).

One million dollars a week would feed everybody in Haiti even if only at a very basic level – at least they would not have to eat earth patties. Instead the Haitians export this money to pay the salaries of such as Zoellick

But Zoellick doesn’t see it that way. According to the World Bank’s website the bank is in the business of eradicating poverty. At the rate it does that in Haiti the Bank, I estimate, will be in the poverty eradication business for another 18,000 years.

The reason Haiti is in its present state is pretty simple. Canada, the United States and France, all of whom consider themselves civilised nations, colluded in the overthrow of the democratic government of Haiti four years ago. They did this for several excellent reasons:

• Haiti 200 years ago defeated the world’s then major powers, France (twice) Britain and Spain, to establish its independence and to abolish plantation slavery. This was unforgivable.

• Despite being bombed, strafed and occupied by the United States early in the past century, and despite the American endowment of a tyrannical and brutal Haitian army designed to keep the natives in their place, the Haitians insisted on re-establishing their independence. Having overthrown the Duvaliers and their successors, the Haitians proceeded to elect as president a little black parish priest who had become their hero by defying the forces of evil and tyranny.

• The new president of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide refused to sell out (privatise) the few assets owned by the government (the public utilities mainly);

• Aristide also insisted that France owed Haiti more than $25 billion in repayment of blood money extorted from Haiti in the 19th century, as alleged compensation for France’s loss of its richest colony and to allow Haiti to gain admission to world trade;

• Aristide threatened the hegemony of a largely expatriate ruling class of so-called ‘elites’ whose American connections allowed them to continue the parasitic exploitation and economic strip mining of Haiti following the American occupation.

• Haiti, like Cuba, is believed to have in its exclusive economic zone, huge submarine oil reserves, greater than the present reserves of the United States

• Haiti would make a superb base from which to attack Cuba.

The American attitude to Haiti was historically based on American disapproval of a free black state just off the coast of their slave-based plantation economy. This attitude was  pithily expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s idea that a black man was equivalent to three fifths of a white man. It was  further apotheosized by Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan who expostulated to Wilson: “Imagine! Niggers speaking French!”

The Haitians clearly did not know their place. In February 2004, Mr John McCain’s International Republican Institute, assisted by Secretary of State Colin Powell, USAID and the CIA, kidnapped Aristide and his wife and transported them to the Central African Republic as ‘cargo’ in a plane normally used to ‘render’ terrorists for torture outsourced by the US to Egypt, Morocco and Uzbekistan.

Before Mr Zoellick went to Haiti last week, the World Bank announced that Mr. Zoellick’s visit would “emphasize the Bank's strong support for the country.” Mr. Zoellick added: "Haiti must be given a chance. The international community needs to step up to the challenge and support the efforts of the Haitian government and its people."

“If Robert Zoellick wants to give Haiti a chance, he should start by unconditionally cancelling Haiti’s debt,” says Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. “Instead the World Bank- which was established to fight poverty- continues to insist on debt payments when Haitians are starving to death and literally mired in mud.”

“After four hurricanes in a month and an escalating food crisis it is outrageous that Haiti is being told it must wait six more months for debt relief,” said Neil Watkins, National Coordinator of Jubilee USA Network.

“Haiti’s debt is both onerous and odious”, added Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners In Health. “The payments are literally killing people, as every dollar sent to Washington is a dollar Haiti could spend on healthcare, nutrition and feeding programs, desperately needed infrastructure and clean water. Half of the loans were given to the Duvaliers and other dictatorships, and spent on Presidential luxuries, not development programs for the poor. Mr. Zoellick should step up and support the Haitian government by cancelling the debt now.”

“Unconditional debt cancellation is the first step in addressing the humanitarian crisis in Haiti,” according to Nicole Lee, Executive Director of TransAfrica Forum. “There is also an urgent need for U.S. policy towards Haiti to shift from entrenching the country in future debt to supporting sustainable, domestic solutions for development.”

The above quotations are taken from an appeal by the organisations represented above.

Further comment is superfluous.  

Poverty and Globalisation

President Jean Bertrand Aristide, now in enforced exile in South Africa, might be sardonically entertained by a new report just published by the world’s  Club of the Rich, the OECD –Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

This report, titled “Growing Unequal” examines the accelerating trend toward economic inequality in the societies of the world’s richest countries.

The report contains several mind-blowing discoveries which will, no doubt, amaze journalists and policy-makers in the Western hemisphere and keep them entertained for many years.

The major finding is that globalisation and free trade have hurt millions of  people, particularly the poorest.

Another ground-breaking discovery is that “work reduces poverty”.

One of these days Jamaicans and other Caribbean people may decide to find out whether these theses are true and whether if they are, we should have signed on to the new EPA with the European Union.

If our ginnigogs were able and willing to read they might become aware of a phenomenon called the “resource curse’ which appears to condemn developing countries with enormous mineral wealth to misery, war, corruption and destitution.

If our ginnigogs could or would read, they might find it useful to discover whether an acre of land under citrus or pumpkins is not more productive, sustainable and valuable than that same acre destroyed for bauxite.

If our ginnigogs could or would read, they might become aware of the fate of the island of Nauru, ‘discovered’ less than two hundred years ago, mined for phosphate, returning a per capita national income rivaling Saudi Arabia’s two and three decades ago and now to be abandoned because the land has been mined to death and is destined to disappear shortly beneath the waves of global warming.

 

Softly, softly, catchee monkee

If our ginnigogs were able to read and willing and able to defend the interests of Jamaica and the Jamaican people they might discover that bauxite mining  will, within a relatively short time, contaminate all the water resources of Jamaica, destroy our cultural heritage, wipe out our priceless biological diversity, deprave our landscape and reduce those of us who survive to a state of penury and hopelessness. Goodbye tourism, goodbye farming, welcome hunger, welcome clay patties.

According to the experts if you drop a live lobster into a pot of boiling water the creature will make frenzied efforts to escape. If, on the other hand, you put him in a pot of cold water and bring it slowly to the boil, the lobster will perish without a struggle.

Jamaica, on the atlas, is shaped a bit like a lobster.

Bon appetit.

Copyright © 2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

Crackle! pop! snap!

I’m not talking about cereal. That would be snap, crackle, pop. Everybody knows that.

Crackle! pop! Snap!

Watching John McCain in action reminds me of Tom Paxton’s sixties song about the marvelous toy that

“…went "Zip" when it moved,

And "Pop" when it stopped,

And, "Whirrr" when it stood still.

I never knew just what it was

And I guess I never will.

Coupling McCain with Alaska’s toxic termagant presents a fairly terrifying vision for the rest of the world. It’s a far way from John Kennedy’s promise four decades ago that the US would be a friend of  people seeking freedom, a friend to the poor and weak. McCain and Palin present a fundamentalist and revanchist face to the world, promising an even rougher ride than George Bush as the Haitians are already aware.

As I said eight years ago, when the United States elects a president they are also electing a kind of chief spokesman for much of a world with aspirations light years away from the parochial vision of civilisation imagined by Bush, Cheney, McCain and Palin. For the rest of us, the US president we hope will be a singer-man for the world, one who embodies, expresses and guarantees the deepest aspirations of people for liberty and dignity. That it is why an English worldwide poll has found that the world wants Obama to win. The preference is almost 100% across countries as disparate as Norway and Saudi Arabia.

Almost all the public opinion surveys conducted in the US over the past few weeks show the Republican ticket steadily losing ground to the Democrats, Obama and Biden. One website is devoted entirely to analysing electoral polling by all the reputable pollsters. (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/) According to them, the odds on Obama being the next president were better than  90% as of this last week, and their projection was that he would win nearly 350 electoral votes with at least  52% of the popular vote

In elections for the Senate the projection was that the democrats would win at least 56 seats – not filibuster proof but close, with the probability of an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives.

Major reasons for these perceptions are the toxic unpopularity of President George Bush whose approval rating is now below Nixon’s just prior to his resignation, the feeling that the US is on the wrong track (more than 80%)   and the catastrophic declines in employment, living standards and economic security.

Adele Polk, a 90 year old woman in Akron, Ohio, shot herself twice in the chest when sheriff’s deputies came to evict her from the house she and her late husband had called home for decades. Mrs Polk’s mortgage has now been forgiven while she is being treated in hospital and is expected to recover.

The bankers and financiers are now among the best hated people in the United States. One sign displayed on Wall Street a few days ago  exhorted the occupants of the office blocks to “JUMP YOU F**KERS” .

Popular opinion is turning savagely against the people FDR called “Malefactors of great wealth”  – the saboteurs of the American dream, con-men whose Ponzi schemes hollowed out the productive centre of American capitalism until the very people they  had defrauded were being asked to come to their rescue, because they were “too big to be allowed to fail” and no one but the taxpayer had the resources to save them. The bailout means the US taxpayer will end up owning huge segments of the financial industry. Will they want to give it back?

 In Illinois’ Cook County –  effectively, Chicago –  the elected Sheriff has decided that his officers will no longer carry out evictions unless he is guaranteed by the mortgage companies that the people he evicts actually owe money on the houses they inhabit. Sheriff Thomas Dart says his officers have been evicting tenants from rented houses, people who have paid their rents to owners who have defaulted. He doesn’t think that’s fair.

All over the US resentment is rising against the injustice of it all, while the Republicans are intent on blaming the victims for the mortgage meltdown. According to the GOP orthodoxy, it was the Democrats in Congress and the federally backed mortgage wholesalers who were responsible along with the poor people who borrowed to buy houses they couldn’t afford.

What really happened is that the Democrats did exert pressure on mortgage companies to lend to minorities and others traditionally segregated outside the mortgage market. The companies responded by inventing mortgages which seemed affordable, but which rapidly morphed  out of the reach of working class and middle class  borrowers who had not read the fine print on their contracts. It was a scam and a highly profitable one which might have worked longer  had it not been so all pervasive that it collapsed of its own over-reach. It extracted billions in savings from the poorest layer of Americans and financed the ability of the scammers to speculate on the basis of ‘securities’  with values notional at best and fictitious at worst.

As in all Ponzi schemes, the crunch had to come when the scam ran out of ‘greater fools’. While the black and Hispanic communities knew they were in trouble two and three years ago, their predators remained blissfully unaware, wheeling and dealing as if there would never be a reckoning.

Now, even John McCain realises that no matter how much he and his cohorts have blamed the working class borrowers, it is important to help them out of trouble. This is one more flip-flop of McCain, who has been boasting about his reformist record, even while his real history is of a serial deregulator, a rule smasher, whose fondest ideals have been for freeing up everything in the interest of the unrestricted market –a man who never met a rule he approved of.

Now, faced with the increasing disapproval of the US electorate it doesn’t seem that even the best efforts of Republican bureaucrats will be able to sabotage the election to the extent where it can be stolen as were the last two.  The disapproval is too wide, too deep. Today, polls show Obama preferred as being a better likely leader, a more compassionate leader and a more able president. McCain is still preferred as a warrior who could prosecute the Iraq war, but since most Americans don’t want to be in Iraq that advantage is nothing compared to the feeling that Obama can best get Americans out of their economic troubles.

 

( Read more... )

 

The Wonders of Jamaica

        Our bureaucrats and technological experts have managed o convince successive governments that bauxite mining and alumina processing are  indispensable to Jamaican development. Successive ministers have blessed the increasingly predatory exploitation of Jamaica’s land and resources for a putrid mess of pottage. If you look at the map above

you may begin to understand that the bauxite industry is planning the effective destruction  of more than half of central and western Jamaica to feed the inexhaustible and unsustainable appetite of the aluminum industry.

In the map – published by the Geography department of the UWI  but authored  by the Jamaica Bauxite Institute – it is clear that Jamaica will go the way of Nauru unless we take steps to stop it.

       Nauru is the tiny Pacific island composed almost entirely  of fosilised bird excrement, guano, and reduced over the years to almost nothing by the mining of this resource. For a time the GDP of Nauru was above that of Saudi Arabia. Now, there is nothing left. The entire island has been exported as fertiliser and the people are trying to find somewhere to live before their island is reclaimed by the sea.

 If the JBI and the aluminum industry have their way Jamaica will become a desert  because almost all the clay in Jamaica is bauxitic and what isn’t clay  is limestone. And the ginnigogs want to dig that down and export that too.

Where will that leave the rest of us?

If we give these maniacs the licence we will lose all our farmland, all of our water supply that has not been poisoned by red mud – caustic soda, arsenic and cadmium; we will lose our magnificent scenery, we will lose our communities, our little villages and towns, we will lose any claim to civilisation and the country will become irreversibly a collection of bantustans in which the gated rich protect themselves from the rampaging poor  who will have no resources except their wits, their weapons and their testosterone.

If we allow the bauxite companies to destroy the Olmec pyramid in St Ann we will be committing a crime against humanity. But there are other wonder of Jamaica of which most of us are not aware. In Patrick Browne’s (1756) Natural History of Jamaica there is a map which shows a ‘grotto’ near Lumsden in St Ann. Three hundred years ago  this was  a tourist attraction. The bauxite companies will obliterate it.

In Trelawny in the Cockpit Country near Stewart Town there is a cave which is a wonder of the hemisphere, if not the world. One section of the Dunn’s Hole cave consists of a chamber over  200 meters long 100 meters wide and 80 meters high – big enough to contain the entire National Stadium. If bauxite and the bureaucrats have their way, all that will go and we shall be left not only in penury, but in the economic slavery that we will deserve.

One of the few  people to have entered the cave describes a huge stalagmite:

 “The width is about four meters, it is over ten meters high, and it is made up of tiers of beautiful flowstone. Despite it being the height of the dry season, there was a great amount of dripping of water down the sides, with this causing it to look like a large, calcified, champagne fountain. The colours consisted of golds and rich browns, and the moisture made it glisten and shine. It put me in mind of the legends associated with many caves in Jamaica that talk about "golden dishes set on golden tables"

Jamaica’s caves are an essential component of the  internal plumbing of our karst geology.  Rivers flow through them, rise from them and sink into them, and no one really knows what would happen if they are damaged or destroyed. The 1979 floods gave some idea  when, huge lakes developed at Chigwell and Exeter in Hanover and at Newmarket and other places  in Westmoreland/St Elizabeth. In Petersfield, Westmoreland a hillside exploded to reveal a river cave and the ensuing flood washed away most of the village and killed several people. People in Manchester say it is the bauxite companies that have caused the flooding of Porus and some believe that the once intermittent Moneague Lake has been made a permanent feature, inundating farm land, by the bauxite mining.

Bauxite mining and red mud have also polluted important water supplies in St Ann, Manchester and St Elizabeth. And Alpart’s mining in Manchester threatens Jamaica’s deepest and one of its most valuable caves – Smokey Hole.

Of course, if the bauxite-maniacs have their way, there won’t be anyone left to bemoan the loss of their water supplies or farmland or water supplies or birds and butterflies and other animals or our fabulous vegetation..

Jamaica – its wonderful people and beautiful landscape will be history.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

 

John Maxwell

The real function of the state is pretty simple: to protect and enhance the interests of its members -- the people; to keep them safe and allow them to be as happy as they can be by doing whatever they want to do without damaging the interests of their neighbours.

The state can never disappear in any reality, because there will always need to be a trustee whose duty it is to enforce or guarantee fair play and to defend the human rights and the property interests  of the society.

The idea of universal human rights is a comparatively recent invention and the concept is steadily being extended, to recognise for instance, the fact that the resources of the earth, from which all wealth is derived, must be apportioned equitably among people and among nations. We are, for instance, just beginning to acknowledge that clean air and water are essential human rights and that no one has any right to damage these properties in their private interest.

In Ecuador the people have recently gone so far as to award rights to ‘Nature’ meaning that any interference with the natural world must be specifically and fully justified in the Public Interest.

This stewardship is the reason the state is compelled to intervene in matters as disparate as climate change and in the threatened crash of the world financial systems.

In the United States, where the wide open spaces of the West gave birth to the idea of Manifest Destiny and in Europe, where Africa was thought to be another wide open space, nations and cultures interpreted their strength as licence to plunder rape and murder whole populations on the ground that they were not using their ’God-given’ endowment as profitably as they should be.

Plantation slavery and the Industrial Revolution it midwifed, seemed to allow the most ruthless exploitation of people and natural resources. Which is why places like the Congo, Angola, Niger, Bolivia, Brazil, and other places have been so ruthlessly exploited that their people remain miserably poor while the foreign investors and their armies so richly rewarded themselves. It is why the so-called ratings agencies in the US were able to believe that junk securities issued by mortgage consolidators were worth more than the bonds issued by starving developing countries. Not only were they worth more, they attracted much lower interest rates because of their presumed worth  Big US companies like Caterpillar are now aggrieved at having to pay ‘extortionate’ interest rates of 7% in the current credit squeeze while developing countries like Jamaica consider themselves lucky when they are asked for twice that.  

 Widow’s mites

And that is why several years ago, when Jamaica and Donald Trump each found themselves financially over-extended, each owing about $4 billion US – Jamaica was forced to abandon free education while Trump got to keep his yacht.

Free enterprise capitalism has been so cornered by the parasites that finance companies that produce nothing, have been able over the past few years to extract 40% of the US GDP as their reward for bringing together “willing” buyers and sellers.

And it is why at the United Nations this week, foreign nations – among them some of the United States’ closest partners, have been so angry at the American failure to regulate their business more fairly and with less prejudice to the rest of the world.

The bureaucrats have triumphed. The managers have captured the wealth of public companies, paying themselves enormous rewards, while the so called shareholder interest has been pushed aside as the managers seized more and more power, allegedly in the interest of shareholder equity. The shareholders are awarded nice little dividends while the managers and financiers take the real harvest in tax-free capital gains.

Last year Goldman Sachs paid out $16 billion to its ‘traders’ who do nothing but make educated bets on stock and commodities markets. Each trader got $600,000 for a year’s ‘work’.

Quick! What’s Jamaica’s GDP?

Bauxite was discovered in Jamaica more than a hundred years ago, contrary to official myth. And the man who discovered a way to transform it into aluminum cheaply was, I believe, born in Jamaica.

In the 1940s however, with a world war looming, the aluminum cartel decided to look for bauxite nearer home than Guyana, more easily safeguarded from German submarines. So Jamaican bauxite, though non-standard on the then world market, became attractive and ways were quickly found to fit new bauxite refineries to process it. That fact was made even more important by two other facts. One, that Jamaica was almost 50% bauxite and two, that Jamaican bauxite was strip mineable, lying on the surface of the earth, needing only to be scraped off.

For years, until Norman Manley came to office in 1955, the bauxite companies paid Jamaica the handsome reward of one shilling ( about 15 American cents) a ton for Jamaica’s only significant mineral resource. In return the companies were supposed to restore the fertility of the soil.   No one knew that this would be impossible if only the first nine inches of topsoil were retained. It didn’t matter anyway;  most of the despoiled land was never ‘restored’ and despite the fact that a fine of $25,000 an acre was to supposed to  be levied on  unrestored land, our Commissioners of Lands, for reasons known only to themselves, allowed the bauxite companies to escape penalty and to ruin the Jamaican land , to destroy its fertility, rob us of its agricultural production (worth much, much more than bauxite); to destroy communities, sending bauxite refugees fleeing to the Bronx and to Kingston ghettoes, impoverishing them and casting them aside as worthless detritus of ‘Development’.

Bauxite crimes are amplified by something else:  The waste of alumina production, red mud is a toxic stew of caustic chemicals and heavy metals like cadmium and arsenic, damaging to human brains and bodies. The fumes of the refineries destroyed the ‘zinc’ roofs of their neighbours and does unknown damage to the lungs of their children. The red mud – even more dangerous – is a long lasting poison to  the underground aquifer which supplies most of Jamaica’s water from its rivers and wells.

One would have imagined that after sixty years of bauxite mining and alumina refining that the well financed Jamaica Bauxite Institute, the Water Resources Authority and the Commissioners of Lands would by now have made definitive studies of the damage already caused by bauxite and the continuing threat to human and animal life, to agriculture and to the tourist industry from this dangerous and unsustainable version of ‘Development’.

But since the Jamaican intermediaries seem so convinced that their true mission is to protect the bauxite companies from Jamaican interests, I think we will be waiting for a very long time to find out the extent of the damage that the industry has done. And, as I have pointed out before, in sixty years, with the exception of Don Tretzel-managed Kaiser and its gift of the Puerto Seco public beach, the companies have given nothing to the exploited communities and people they have so grievously damaged. Not a single technical school! Chickenfeed.

There is one more piece of vandalism to come.

As I have written before there is what I believe is an Olmec pyramid in the region of Gibraltar/Moneague  which has not interested our official cultural stewards. If I am right this monument would rewrite the official history of the hemisphere and make it clear that ancient America was populated from Africa. But whether the African connection is provable, the pyramid is part of the cultural heritage of mankind and should be protected, examined, catalogued and preserved for its transcendental importance.

In trying to locate   the pyramid using the Google Earth programme on my computer I believe I have identified a fairly extensive set of ruins which suggest to me that the pyramid was part of a much larger settlement antedating Columbus by nearly 2,000 years.

These relics lie in the direct path of the latest plan for bauxite devastation and in the path of the bypass road  which is being built to facilitate the more  extensive and  more expeditious depraving of the landscape and culture of St Ann, the former Garden Parish. It also lies in the path of the exploitation and destruction of the Cockpit Country, the geological, biological, historical and cultural heart of Jamaica.

I am appealing to people like Butch Stewart, the proprietor of this newspaper and other patriotic Jamaicans to finance an expedition to discover exactly what is at Union Hill and its environs.

If I am right, the destruction of this unique cultural artifact would be the modern equivalent of  the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria more than 2,000 years ago and ust a little less wicked than the Rumsfeld-sanctioned  looting of 8,000 years of civilised history in Iraq.

We cannot allow this vandalism in the name of ‘Development’.

 We cannot allow any further Bauxite ‘Development’ which impoverishes us financially, culturally and  socially and destroys our communities, our precious water supplies, our history and our peace.

 We owe it to history, to civilisation, to ourselves and to humanity to find a more civilised way.

Copyright © 2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com 

John Maxwell

The modern world was invented in the Caribbean.

Two hundred years ago the Haitians defeated the armies of Europe's major powers, Napoleon's France (twice), Britain and Spain, destroying  slavery and precipitating the  birth of capitalism, destroying European empire in the Western hemisphere and helping launch the United States as a world power. And they promulgated, for the first time on Earth, the reality of universal human rights.

The Haitians have been paying for their temerity ever since.

Fifty years ago, the Cubans threw off the neocolonial yoke, outlawed capitalism in Cuba and successfully asserted the right of any country, no matter how small to choose its own path to development. In the process the Cubans reordered George Canning's boast that he had brought a new world into being to redress the balance of the old: The Cubans completed the liberation of Africa,  dealing a death blow to apartheid and the repulsive doctrine of ethnic difference and superiority.

For their sins the Cubans and Haitians continue to be punished, the Haitians by slow motion genocide, by compound interest and by state terrorism, by armed banditry in support of criminal monopolists and by the kidnapping of their elected leader. The Cubans have been punished by terrorism, by invasion, by biological warfare and by a brutal and illegal economic blockade.

The two peoples nearest us – to whom most of the hemisphere owe their freedom – are punished as Prometheus was for stealing divine fire and giving it to ordinary mortals. Zeus punished Prometheus when he finally caught up with him, by having him chained to a rock – perhaps in South Ossetia --   where a vulture would come to feast on Prometheus' liver, magically regenerated overnight.

Nature has dealt the Haitians and Cubans some serious blows. These blows are so many and so devastating that some people have begun to question whether what is happening is entirely natural.

Does someone ‘own’ the weather?

Cuba's fertile province of Pinar del Rio, which grows everything from plantain to the worlds' best tobacco, has been hit 14 times in 8 years by hurricane or storm. Comparing the strike rate over the last century suggests that global warming or some other force is tormenting Cuba.

 ‘I have never seen anything as painful …’

Dr Paul Farmer, an American physician, medical anthropologist and  Harvard professor has spent about half his adult life dedicated to healing the world, especially Haiti the poorest country in the hemisphere. When the first storms broke over Haiti, Paul was in Rwanda, doing what he does all over the world, setting up systems to help ordinary people help heal themselves and their neighbours. He dashed back to Haiti from which he reported on Wednesday   “…we need food, water, clothes, and, especially, cash (which can be converted into all of the above)—so that Zanmi Lasante (ZL), and thus all of us, can do our part to save lives and preserve human dignity.

"The need is enormous. After 25 years spent working in Haiti and having grown up in Florida, I can honestly say that I have never seen anything as painful as what I just witnessed in Gonaïves—except in that very same city, four years ago. Again, you know that 2004 was an especially brutal year, and those who work with PIH know why: the coup in Haiti and what would become Hurricane Jeanne. Everyone knows that Katrina killed 1,500 in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast, but very few outside of our circles know that what was then Tropical Storm Jeanne, which did not even make landfall in Haiti, killed an estimated 2,000 in Gonaïves alone."

Paul Farmer thought he would have found organisations and institutions working on disaster relief. Instead, Farmer's health care organisation – Partners in Health (Zanmi Lasante in Haitian) have ben forced into the front line.   PIH is a network of locally directed organizations working in 10 countries  to attack poverty and inequality and bring the fruits of modernity—healthcare, education, etcetera—to people marginalized by adverse social forces.

In Haiti they have now been forced into a different role -- which is why Paul Farmer is apologising to his staff and friends for asking for money,  food and other resources.

" … we saw not a single first-aid station or proper temporary shelter. We saw, rather, people stranded on the tops of their houses or wading through waist-deep water; we saw thousands in an on-foot exodus south toward Saint-Marc

Farmer is appealing desperately for help against a background  of official ignorance and failure.

"A speedy, determined relief effort could save the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians in Gonaïves and all along the flooded coast. The people of that city and others have been stranded without food or water or shelter for three days and it's simply not true that they cannot be reached. When I called to say as much to friends working with the U.S. government and with disaster-relief organizations based in Port-au-Prince, it became clear that, as of yesterday, there's not a lot of accurate information leaving Gonaïves, although estimates of hundreds of deaths are not hyperbolic."

Part of the problem in Haiti is that the American managed coup against President Aristide was a coup against democratic community organisations as well. The Haiti Democracy Project, USAID and John McCain's International Republican Institute calculated that they would fatally undermine Aristide by destroying the grassroots organisations. What they did was to destroy the Haitians' capacity to help themselves.

Evacuating the population of Jamaica

Cuba is organised as a mutual aid society in which every citizen has his responsibilities, his duties and his place. When hurricanes threaten Cuba, people move out of the way guided by the neighourhood  Committees for the Defense of the Revolution –CDR. They move the old and the young, the sick and the healthy and their cats, dogs, parrots, their goats, donkeys and cows, to safe places.

Here is a truly incredible fact. Last week the Cubans moved 2,615,000 people – a number nearly equivalent to the entire population of Jamaica, to safety. Four people died in the storm, the first fatalities for years. It is a remarkable statistic. Three years ago when Texas tried to evacuate a million or so ahead of hurricane Rita more than a hundred people died in the evacuation.

The hurricanes hitting Cuba this year have been peculiarly destructive, Gustav leaving behind wreckage which reminded Fidel Castro of the wreckage of Hiroshima.

Cuba needs food, not because of poverty –as in Haiti, but because its crops have been devastated and food stores destroyed. When the Cubans asked the Americans to allow them to buy supplies from the US, Condoleezza Rice said no!

The Cubans were not asking for charity.

Some of us have long suspected that for some Americans, ideology was more important than humanity.

That celebrated rhetorical question in the Bible has now been answered by Secretary Rice:

If your brother asks for bread, will you give him a stone?

The essence of being human is that other humans recognise your humanity, I, and probably many others, are unable to recognise Ms Rice as human.

It is savagely ironic, or, perhaps, barbarically ironic that it is the Cubans who should be treated in this way. When people are in trouble anywhere in the world the Cubans send help no matter what the state of relations is with their governments, to Honduras, Guatemala and Pakistan among others. When Katrina hit the US the Cubans organised a 1,500 strong medical brigade which would have saved many lives, had their help been accepted.

But, as the Bible says, let the dead bury their dead.

We need to organise to help as many people as possible survive the effects of the hurricanes.

We need to organise funds for Haiti and food for Cuba.

I would hope that this newspaper [The Jamaica Observer] organises a relief fund for our worst hit neighbours and I will offer what I can, J$10,000 [US$138].

I would urge us to demonstrate our sympathy and solidarity by giving as much as we can, no matter how small.

Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com.

[Partners in Health – the organisation John mentions above –  has a website at http://www.pih.org]

John Maxwell

Sherwood Content in Trelawny and Waterhouse in St Andrew are about as far away as you can get from the big-time. The roads leading to both places are pitted, potholed disasters, and streetlights and other public amenities are singularly lacking, the schools ramshackle excuses for educational institutions held together by love and the dedication of poor people.

Yet over the last few days children from these and similar communities have, half a world away, basked in the adulation of more people than they have ever seen in their lives. They have all managed to defy the considerable odds against them, and are  become international heroes; young men and women whose achievements have confounded, excited, astonished and enchanted billions of others round the world.

Their stories are all different, and although many of them will ascribe their presence on the Olympic  podium  to the care and attention of teachers, coaches and sponsors, their stories are in reality  tributes to their own individual selves, to their ability to outperform their fellows, to convert lucky breaks into concrete opportunities and to deliver the goods before any audience, anywhere, any time. The Jamaican Olympic team as I write on Thursday, has not completed its agenda but it has already done better than any previous team from this country and better than teams from countries with much larger populations and resources.

In Track & Field, on Thursday afternoon, Jamaica and Russia were tied with five gold medals each, the US had four , Kenya and Ethiopia had two each. In the total number of medals won in track and field, Jamaica with 9 was third behind the US 20 and Russia 10 and ahead of all other countries.

Herb McKenley: Thou should’st be alive at this Hour!

What is most interesting to me is that the more level the playing field, the more dope testing is done, the better Jamaica does. The ‘natural mystic’ is powerful indeed and does not depend on technological enhancements of the chemical kind.

The fact that Jamaica has dine so well is disquieting to those who don’t know us and lots of questions have been asked about our testing procedures. The short answer is that our athletes are among the most thoroughly  tested in the world.

Owen Slot, Chief Sports Reporter of the Times, reported: “In Beijing, the unprecedented success of the Jamaican track and field team has come to general attention. The IAAF accordingly produced the following statistics: there are 22 elite Jamaicans and they [each]  have been tested out of competition, on average, two or three times since January 1. Bolt has been tested four times out of competition, three times in competition and six times since he arrived in Beijing.”(my italics)

I believe that the continual testing is probably what defeated Asafa Powell, who believes that the taking of blood for tests weakened him. I believe Powell, like another sporting genius, Lawrence Rowe, defeats himself  before he ever gets to the arena.

In Beijing, our men and the women have performed above expectations, no doubt, powerfully inspired by Usain Bolt’s performances. I loved Shelly Ann’s wide-eyed jumping for joy in victory,  Kerron’s steely courage and determination, Veronica’s gracious majesty – I loved them all, the medal winners and those who also ran . It was mindblowing to watch the women’s 100 meters, knowing what Bolt had done, and to realise that many of our young champions had never been on such a stage before. Their bravery alone is worth saluting; added to performances  that did their country prouder than we had any right to expect.

 

The Man of the Moment

The American Michael Phelps with his eight gold medals was the statistical hero of the first week of the Games. There is no doubt that Usain Bolt has been the hero of the second week. The sportswriters have strained for adjectives to properly describe him, concluding that he is probably the greatest sprinter of all time. He is the only man to have broken the Olympic and World records in the process of winning gold medals in the 100 and 200 meter sprints, only the second athlete to have held both world records simultaneously since Don Quarrie of Jamaica three decades ago and the first man in a quarter of a century to have captured both Olympic titles at the same games.

There seems to be something in Bolt that brings out the best in sportswriters. Some of the reports of his feats are among the best sportswriting I have read for a very long time. Most have been as scrupulous as possible,  and I was particularly chuffed to notice one who pointed out that while Michael Johnson’s 200m world record was done with a slight following wind, Bolt was running into a headwind when he broke that record.

But it is Bolt’s personality that has entranced the writers. His  straightforward innocence – though none of them use that word – has captivated them. His is the essence of cool, no ‘side’ as the English used to say; just a natural unforced joie de vivre which even his beaten competitors enjoy and appreciate. So when the head of the Olympic movement, Jacques Rogge, slated Usain for discourtesy  in ‘showing off’ and not congratulating his competitors, everybody came to Bolt’s defence. If Rogge had really ‘seen’ the race he would gave realised that unlike any other 100 meters ever run at the Olympics,  the leader was so far away from the field that he  would have had to go back a long way to perform the usual obsequies – sorry, courtesies.

 

Out of the Cockpit

I was born about ten miles as the crow flies, from Usain’s birthplace and my father used to preach at his community church, Waldensia.  Driving to Sherwood Content now  is not much different to sixty years ago. The road is still awful. but the scenery is grand, with the cliffs of the Cockpit Country looming over the road for much of the journey from Clark’s Town.

Usain Bolt proves, if proof were needed, that the Cockpit Country still has treasures to offer the world. The treasures include  its people, who have never given up the real struggle for autonomy and self respect, as well as  the natural endowment which is beyond cataloguing.

Here is the real Jamaican heartland, the geological, historical and cultural nexus of our civilisation.

That is why some of us want to protect it from the lustful embrace of the bauxite companies and other ‘developers’ who want what’s there for the money they can make out of it and to leave it barren, devastated and useless.

Usain Bolt behaves like a Trelawny man. He has taken his destiny into his own hands. He chose his coach himself and though he listens to everything he says, he is not simply a puppet – as some athletes are to their trainers and as some of us are to our leaders and our economic superiors.

The road away from Sherwood Content is a demonstration of the past, sugar cane flourishing where food should be growing.

Usain Bolt shows the new way to independence, self-development and community responsibility. I hear he is putting money into various projects in his community. He knows where he came from and he knows where he is going.

As he said, after the 200 meters final, echoing Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali after his Olympic triumph 40 years ago-– he is “the Greatest”.

It’s the truth. It is not a boast.

There’s a natural mystic, blowing through the air …

________________

For a good word on Rogge, read Sally Jenkins in the Washing ton Post <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/21/AR2008082101863.html>

Copyright © 2008 John Maxwell

Jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

 ‘ First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win’

– Mohandas K Gandhi.

It’s not just us.

The world really  is over-supplied with jackasses.

We are pretty good at making fools of ourselves but we have lots of company.

The Jamaican Port Authority , along with the UDC, are our leading competitors in the World Olympics of Waste and Futile Activity (WOWAFA.)

As everybody but the Port Authority knows, fuel prices are making mincemeat of globalisation and world trade.

Distance costs money, as Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets (CIBCWM) points out. Rubin is one of the world’s most trusted economic prognosticators and has recently published an analysis of  the effect of transport costs on world trade. There seem to be  no serious critics of his conclusions.

    Rubin/CIBCWM  report that the cost of shipping a standard 40-foot container from East Asia to the North American east coast has already tripled since 2000 and will double again as oil prices head towards US$200 per barrel over the next two years These soaring energy costs are threatening to offset decades of trade liberalization and force some overseas manufacturing to return closer to North AmericA.

    “Unless that container is chock full of diamonds, its shipping costs have suddenly inflated the cost of whatever is inside," adds Mr. Rubin. "And those inflated costs get passed onto the Consumer Price Index when you buy that good at your local retailer. As oil prices keep rising, pretty soon those transport costs start cancelling out the East Asian wage advantage."

    The Port Authority’s development plans are predicated on the permanence of the East Asian wage advantage. The Authority believes that for the foreseeable future, enormous container ships from China and the rest of Asia will provide an assured agency income for Jamaica. We simply have to destroy the environment of Kingston Harbour to build an enormous container transshipment port and the riches will flood in.

Mr Rubin says, on the other hand,  that oil prices and transport costs will soon cancel out the advantages of low-wage driven globalisation. “"Higher energy prices are impacting transport costs at an unprecedented rate. So much so, that the cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today."

Rubin points out that Chinese steel, which has for years rendered US steel production uncompetitive, is now, suddenly,  uncompetitive in the US market and imports are now falling by more than 20% year over year while US steel production has risen by almost 10%.

So, the Port Authority of Jamaica is proposing to squander more than a billion Jamaican dollars on the next stage of its Hunt’s bay reclamation project. Earlier phases  consisted of relocating toxic waste from the bottom of Kingston Harbour to newly created land adjacent to Portmore – the world’s first known instance of the deliberate  creation of what in the US would be called a Superfund site, a toxic health menace.

All of this has been done out of public view, with public money, with no parliamentary oversight, no Environmental Impact Assessment, no information to the public on the health or financial  dangers implicit in this development. 

It is nearly a decade since i first warned about these lunatic schemes, about the same time as I was warning about the environmental and financial disaster built into the Doomsday Highway.

We in Jamaica are experts at  expensive and futile unsustainable developments, we are only now understanding the price we are paying for bauxite development and we have just begun paying the real price for the Doomsday Highway.

The Gleaner Business section, on Independence Day, on the page after the Port Authority story, carries a discreet story which should have been on the front page

“Jamaica giving up on export bananas” was the headline, written no doubt, by  a descendant of Christopher Columbus.

We have been talking about the idiocy of trying to export factory farmed bananas and sugar, We have recommended getting out of those  ratholes voluntarily and finding alternative and better options while we had time.

We could have used the time to restructure our farming and revitalising family farms. We need to use our land to grow food, not to produce profits to be lodged in Liechtenstein or Cayman.

But we are not done. The elites who know everything are busy recommending that we sign the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Union for some glorious globalised benefits for the fifty or sixty companies engaged in the moronic slavery-based production of sugar. The head of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery says that if all the Caribbean ‘partners do not sign the whole deal may be off.

I haven’t heard better news for years.

We were being asked to swallow agreements negotiated for the benefit of finance houses and antagonistic to the public interest. Only Guyana has the nerve to say that the agreements are an unfair disaster. One hopes that the Guyanese will not sign and thereby derail the whole corrupt process. Corrupt, because the people have had not the slightest say in agreements which will bind them for decades if not centuries. Not only do we not have any say, we don’t even know what’s in these agreements.

In the Observer on Emancipation Day there is news that light may be dawning in certain quarters. It has been discovered that we have a tourist industry which can be a reliable market for home grown, organically produced cosmetics. In a decade or two it will become obvious that the same possibilities exist for locally produced food. Despite some recent easing in the  the inexorably rising price of oil, the Jamaican farmer (an almost extinct species) will soon have serious advantages in the national and regional  markets as well as in niche markets abroad.

What would make sense is for us to turn these massive investments in crazy schemes into investments in more practical plans. Solar energy for one – photovoltaic arrays on some of the lands made worthless by bauxite mining, on offshore wind turbines  and on submarine wave  generators using the energy of the perpetual currents of the North Atlantic drift passing through the waters north and south of this island.

In Portugal, a relatively poor country which, like Jamaica, imports nearly all its energy, the world’s largest photovoltaic electricity generating plant is about to go on stream. It will have taken four years from start  to finish and will provide  Portugal with electricity from the sun at prices competitive with thermally generated energy.

The new facility at Moura in Alentejo in Southern Portugal covers 700 acres, about as much as the Port Authority’s installation in Kingston.

At  250 million euro the cost of the Moura plant is about the same as the cost of the Port Authority’s Phase Five expansion .

At 65 MegaWatts, it ‘s capacity would be about one quarter of the installed capacity at the JPS Old Harbour Bay power station. Construction costs are about the same as thermal generation units but the big difference is that after the station is built the fuel is free sunlight, making an immediate and serious dent in money to be found to import petroleum. An additional bonus is that the Portuguese – as part of the development– require the contractors to build a plant to manufacture photovoltaic modules providing good local jobs and skills. And since photovoltaic power stations can be built almost anywhere, transmission costs and problems are minimised.

Wonder of Wonders“

“EU to give Haiti millions for food, health care” is the headline over a story from Brussels, Belgium (AP) — ”The European Union says it will give Haiti $4.6 million to help pay for food in the world's poorest country.”

Millions, think of it – Millions!  It will buy an enormous number of mud cakes.

The munificence and self sacrifice of the Europeans is astounding. It will amount to the stupendous  sum of  about fifty cents per Haitian.

Parliament should pass a vote of thanks.

Some of Haiti’s other predators, including USAID, are providing similar pittances to rescue Haiti from destitution and desperation. The coordinator of the anti-Aristide coup, Senator John McCain’s International Republican Institute has not said whether it will contribute to the recovery process. Perhaps the Haitians should be paying them for their good works. The Haitians paid France about 25 billion dollars  in modern money  to be allowed to trade freely after winning their war of independence.

It is a safe bet that none of the people responsible for the decapitation of Haitian democracy will contribute as much to its rehabilitation as they did to its rape. It is as if a man who has just comprehensively  violated a woman, should turn round, and out of the simple  goodness of his heart, buy her a croissant.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

The complete CIBC World Markets report is available at:

    http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/smay08.pdf

 

 

John Maxwell

Truisms and clichés become truisms and clichés because they express rules of experience – the probability that certain behaviours are almost bound to have certain predictable effects. ‘Marry in haste’, one says, ‘repent at leisure’.

Recently in Hartley Neita’s collection of stories from old Gleaners, there was the tale  of a man in St Mary who was so bothered by the plaster-cast on his broken ankle that he decided to cut the damned thing off. You know what’s coming, don’t you?

At the end of the process he found he’d amputated his foot.

According to Carl Stone’s polls at the time, most Jamaicans enthusiastically supported the Suppression of Crimes Act and the Gun Court, (1974) and the State of Emergency (1976). Before we were very much older, most of us were appealing piteously to be rid of these magic bullets, which had been guaranteed to make us all safer and happier and would probably cure teenage sex,  bad breath and incontinence to boot.

Will we never learn?

We disregard common sense warnings – from the Bible to John Stuart Mill and Mark Twain to Louise Bennett, to go whoring after instant solutions that sound good if we don’t think about them too hard.

For instance, the call for indefinite detention is an echo of the legislation for the Gun Court declared unconstitutional not too long ago. Removal of Judges’ discretion reflects the so-called ‘Rape Act’ provisions of 1964, found not too long after to be oppressive and counter-productive.

I could go on, but why?

Id over Superego

Sigmund Freud may have been wrong abut many things, but his theory of Id, Ego and Superego seems destined to have validity for a little while yet, describing the areas of the psychic apparatus that govern our human behaviour, The ID or “It” is the instinctive bundle of reflexes at the base of our psyches (or minds)

IT/ID “ is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality… a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations ... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.”

It is the place where our lusts hide,along with other primitive emotions like revenge and greed but also all our basic drives for food, sex and our instinctive altruism, sympathy and tender instincts. Id is not bad, simply untaught and unorganised. Babies’ minds are all Id, according to Freud, amoral, egocentric, satisfaction directed.

According to Freud, “...The Ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces”.

The Superego is a form of referee, the public face of the mind, a kind of diplomatic representation of all the conflicting urges mediated by external experience – a conscious construct from the cultures we inhabit.

Part of the charm of ordinary life lies in the innocence of much of human behaviour, moderated by what we have learned as we grow up, driven by our need for acceptance, love, respect and so on. All these things become more sophisticated, more subtle, more rounded and less clumsy as we mature.

Some authorities now believe that it isn’t until about age 24 that physical development of the brain is more or less complete. That suggests that psychic maturity is an even longer process than we thought. I myself believe that maturity is a continuing process and that we don’t stop learning/growing until we die.

If all or even most of this is true. it seems clear to me that becoming truly human is a very long-term process and that our educational systems, culminating in University, are really all part of kindergarten. When we speak of people mellowing we are in fact describing psychic maturation.

This in my view logically leads to the need for a radical re-evaluation and transformation of our educational systems, because, it seems to me, we are aborting the real possibilities of civilisation by neglecting the basic needs of human development.

Masters and Slaves

I have for a very long time had a problem with Lord Acton’s aphorism that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

It seems to me that absolute powerlessness is a much greater corrupter than absolute power. In the first place, outside of slave societies, absolute power is not very common.

However, both inside and outside of slave societies, absolute powerlessness is the rule for most of humanity who find themselves overwhelmed by forces natural and artificial against whom it is almost impossible to exert any influence.

As inheritors of a former slave society today’s Jamaica suffers from a long indoctrination in submission to superior forces which can generally only be challenged by violence. The ruling classes (an amalgam of the heirs of slave-owners and a motley aggregation of recruits of all colours) and most of the rest of the population continue to behave as if it is still 1837, during the so-called apprenticeship period before Emancipation. A very large number of people still are unaware of their human rights or at least, unaware that they can claim these rights. And many among the ruling classes and just below still behave as if they do not have to take the interests and feelings of the majority into consideration.

These attitudes are the products of a pervasive culture in which, from time to time, the interests and passions of one class boil over, scorching the interests of the others.

In the last 30 years, starting before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the forces of finance capital launched a hostile takeover bid for the world, and, in places like Jamaica, recruited a substantial quota of middle class people who bought into the idea that if their lusts were attended to, health, wealth and happiness would naturally follow for  the ‘less fortunate’.

That phrase – ‘the less fortunate’ – both conceals and exposes the real truth – that life in a world ruled by finance capital is a lottery, a matter of chance,  fortune, of luck rather than ability or work.

So, people like P.J.Patterson and Edward Seaga were able to believe, no doubt sincerely, that separating thousands of people from their jobs was in their own best interests, and that somehow the people who had worked to build Jamaica over 500 years were parasites who had to be taught to work.

This attitude went with a total disregard and disrespect for any development which was not what I call, ‘Heavy Metal’ and poured scorn on Pearnell Charles when he suggested that in the interest of fair play and fair shares, those who were capable only of manual labour should b given the chance to perform it.

Development in this perspective is rather like General McArthur’s campaign against the Japanese: he simply skipped over islands of resistance if they didn’t seem significant, leaving unpacified, Japanese soldiers who were still in a state of war decades after both their Emperor, Hirohito, and McArthur had departed the scene.

The globalised development of Jamaica similarly simply skipped islands of poverty and need within the society, abandoning them to the elements, as it were.

Without government and its services these places developed their own cultures, their own rules and authorities – their own governance. It is no accident that the areas of violence in Jamaica are sharply defined. Described as garrison constituencies they have little to do with partisan politics but everything to do with underdevelopment.

In these places, the children are educated according to rules which are bizarre and outlandish to some of us, just as some of the rules developed 4 millennia ago by wandering nomads in the Egyptian desert seem bizarre and outlandish to us. From this governance and from these rules, come the violence and antisocial behaviour we fear.

Indefinite detention and mandatory sentences will not cure them. If we want to rescue ourselves we first need to rescue those who are most at risk.

Buying the Press Association

In 55 years of membership in the Jamaica Press Association/Press Association of Jamaica I have been part of continuing efforts to get the media house that employ journalists to help make life a little more civilised for journalists.

Long ago we began seeking to allow journalists to have portable pensions, so that if they moved between jobs, as journalists do, they wouldn’t lose everything.

We got no response.

When a year or so ago we tried to establish a fund for indigent journalists we were solemnly warned that  we had better be careful we didn’t compromise our precious integrity by soliciting money from outsiders such as media owners.

Now, various elements of the media are attempting a hostile takeover bid for the Press Association. Media owners are paying subscription fees for journalists who are expected to vote down the current leadership of the Association in favour of a candidate from the Gleaner.

Stay tuned.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu @gmail.com

The following letter was sent by three veteran Caribbean journalists (two Jamaicans and a Guyanese) to the editor of the the New Yorker. It is doubtful that it will see the light of day in the US press, so, at the urging of al_zorra I reproduce it here.

To: themail@newyorker.com

To the Editor

As journalists and human beings we all understand that public life is not a kindergarten and that politicians and others in the public eye are always at risk of hard rough challenges. We also believe that journalism has the right and the duty to expose falsity and corruption wherever they are found.

That being said, we believe there are certain bounds within which responsible journalism must find itself constrained: we have no right to rob people of their dignity, their privacy or their reputations. And, as your Justice Holmes once said, 'Freedom of speech does not give anyone the right to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre'.

Your editor, David Remnick is quoted by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post as defending the Obama cover as a 'satire' “ as a way of making fun of all the rumors'. We confess that we and everyone to whom  we have spoken,  must have missed the point of the satire. We see no 'fun' in it. What we see appears to be  a clumsy, maladroit drawing which is obviously directed at the Obamas personally and not at 'rumors'.

Satire “ if it is satire “ requires wit and point, it requires art, in turning the obvious on its head to illustrate the truth hidden beneath. Satire does not need to be amusing, but it should be able to provoke an insight, a glimpse of a larger truth and the recognition, wry or rueful, perhaps, that we have been led, perhaps even tricked, into a new point of view, a perspective hitherto unnoticed.

Your plain, bald posterisation of the major untruths circulated against Barack and Michelle Obama does not provide any of this. In the present state of race relations in the United States and round the world, this is incendiary stuff, the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theatre.

It seems  calculated to provoke hatred and contempt for Barack and Michele Obama and other people of colour,  and like, the Danish cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed, likely to incite violence.

All of us have been readers of the New Yorker over the years and none of us can remember anything so patently inhumane or  propagandistic ever appearing before anywhere in the magazine.

We think you owe the Obamas and  the world, an apology

We are three senior journalists from the Caribbean with over a hundred years of experience among us

John Maxwell <jankunnu@gmail.com>
Canute James <canute.james@cwjamaica.com>
Rickey Singh <rickeys@sunbeach.net>

John Maxwell

It may come as a surprise to many more Europeans than to American white people that a great many intelligent and sophisticated people of African ancestry are convinced that there are important classes of whites who are conspiring to wipe them off the face of the Earth.

This may be the most pervasive conspiracy theory of all because it is made more credible by an impressive history of genocidal attacks on black people and other non-whites. Advocates for ‘Indians’ of the Amazon say the natives believe they are threatened not simply by greedy ranchers and gold miners but by missionaries from the United states, hoping to clear oii-rich areas of the indigenous populations as in Darfur. In Bolivia, for example, the recent attempt by some provinces to disaffiliate themselves from the rest of the state is seen as a kind of proto-genocide aimed at separating the richest land from control by the majority Indian populations.

The slave trade was itself a genocidal operation as well as a plutocratic enterprise, and there are those who say that the damage done by the Slave trade has been grievously underestimated, in order to deprecate the importance of Africans and their civilisatyions and therefore their worth in the world.

King Leopold’s ‘civilising’  assault on the Congolese, described by him as a charitable endeavour  comparable in intent to the Red Cross, was able to kill 10 million Congolese in 20 years, suggesting that the toll of the slave trade may have been grossly underestimated.   In South Africa, the 50 year Apartheid regime was not only explicitly anti-African, but in its terminal stages was frantically developing biocidal agents to eliminate and exterminate black people all over the world. Dr Wouter Basson, a cardiologist was the lead scientist in the attempt to sanitise the world for white people. He still practices medicine in South Africa.

The United States has always had a bad reputation in race matters. Although a black Barbadian, Crispus Attucks was the first American military casualty of the Revolutionary war, and blacks from Haiti, including the later Emperor of Haiti Henri Cristophe, fought for American Independence, blacks were infamously defined as only three fifths human when the new state proclaimed its freedom and independence.

It was probably no surprise that twenty years later the new state of Haiti proclaimed its own  independence, that the Haitians, having fought for freedom over 3 centuries, thought it so precious that they implemented  the first universal declaration  of human rights, valuing every human being, male and female, adult and  child, as essentially entitled to the same rights.

Ever since then the Americans and the Haitians have been at odds over freedom and human rights and the United States has felt able, whenever it chose, to ‘intervene’ to put the Haitians in their proper place.

There is not enough time to detail the various methods used to pacify the restless natives of Haiti, including dive-bombing peasants in the 1920s, installing a cruel and corrupt army in the thirties and watching paternally as the army and the elite, empowered by the US, wreaked their sadistic and oppressive will on the Haitian people.

Having tolerated and fostered the .wicked Duvalier dictatorships for 30 years, the US  and its elite clients were not about to let democracy loose on the Haitian people. And when the Haitians decided to reclaim their freedom under the leadership of Jean Bertrand Aristide, the Americans first sabotaged and then aborted the Haitians’ dreams of democracy, first by blackmail and then at gunpoint.

Rock stone a’ river bottam

If the Americans had left the Haitians to their own devices they would probably be just as poor but a lot less miserable

 When Jean Bertrand Aristide took office in Haiti in 1990 it was with the enthusiastic approval of the Haitian people, who saw in him the man of their dreams of emancipation, the little black priest who knew them and what they wanted to do. The Duvaliers and their successor military rulers allowed the parasitic  elite,  Haitian/American businessmen and other foreigners  with ‘dual citizenship’ to rape and pillage Haiti. Aristide meant to build paradise on the dungheap their oppressors had created. That was not the American/elite plan

 They threw him out after a few months but relented under pressure to accept him back in 1994 to serve out the few months left of his term. When he campaigned again for reelection after the Preval interregnum (Haitian presidents are limited to one term) the Americans directed by the International Republic Institute and US AID poured millions into Haiti to set up anti Aristide movements. It didn’t work but they continued with campaigns of lies, slander and political doublespeak designed to discredit him internationally, if not in Haiti.

Since they couldn’t move his people they hit on a brilliant idea. They would make it impossible for him to govern.

“The prevalence of disease and malnutrition is staggering in Haiti. The country is plagued by the highest HIV rates in the hemisphere, representing nearly 60 percent of the known HIV infections in the Caribbean. Tuberculosis remains endemic and is a significant cause of mortality. Malaria—nearly non-existent in many other Caribbean countries—remains a deadly problem in Haiti. Even simple prevention measures, such as childhood vaccination for tuberculosis, are woefully lacking.

“Water-related diseases are also rampant throughout Haiti. For example, in 1999, infectious diarrhea was found to be the second leading cause of death in Haiti. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 88 percent of diarrhea cases in the world result from the combination of unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation, and improper hygiene.xlii In the same 1999 study, gastro-intestinal infection was the leading cause of under-five mortality in Haiti.”

‘Water is Life’

If Haiti could manage to bring clean water to the people, that alone would revolutionise the country. It would be a powerful means of raising health standards generally and preventing epidemic infant deaths. It would, by itself, be a new dawn of freedom.

The InterAmerican Development Bank agreed and in 1998 said it would lend Haiti some money to set up modern water supplies in two cities for a start. To get these loans Haiti cleaned up its debs to the international financial institutions and got ready for some progress.

They are still waiting. The water supplies, intended to reduce disease and infant mortality were repeatedly blocked by the United States and its accomplices. The George Bush administration intervened illegally to stop the IDB distributing the pittance and the other members of the Bank including France and Canada went along with the fraud. And countries like Jamaica, Trinidad and the rest of the hemisphere, caved in like terrified pimps and said not a word.

Meanwhile Aristide was getting help from Cuba to build a medical school; Dr Paul Farmer’s Boston based Partners in Health was revolutionising the management and treatment of HIV/AIDS, which had been decimating Haiti and Aristide built more schools in three years than had been but in Haiti for the past 200.

He had to go.

Worthies such as the Jamaican descended Colin Powell swallowed the propaganda of the elite and their fascist North American friends. Luigi Einaudi, the American deputy secretary General of the Organization of American states was heard to say that all that was wrong with Haiti was that Haitians were running the place.

They would soon fix that.

Some of the most fantastic lies began to be spread about Aristide He was a devil worshipper, a dictator, a hater of democracy, a tyrant, a terrorist, a murderer. and one fine morning in 2004, almost exactly 200 years after the worlds first declaration of human rights on the soil of Haiti, the American ambassador came to President Aristide with a message. You’d better leave old chap, or there are people here with some coffins for you and your wife.

So, the dream was over. Aristide was gone. And, best of all, the poor, disease ridden Haitians would not get their water supplies, would have to forget that they were human beings deserving of rights and respect and would still be dipping  water from gutters and puddles.

There is a report out this last week which chronicles this bestial farce in excruciatingly painful detail. It is published by a coalition of NGOs: the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice and its affiliate the International Human Rights Clinic at Mew York University’s School of Law, and  Partners in Health, now the largest health care providers in Haiti with its sister organisation in Haiti, Zanmi Lasante, treating almost 2 million patients last year, building houses and treating malnutrition as well as AIDS and TB and The report is in English but is  called in Haitian creole Wòch nan Soley : The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti. Woch nan soley may be  loosely translated into jamaican creole as “Rock stone a ribba bottam neva know sun hot.”

It is an irresistible true story of some of the most depraved mischief ever visited upon any people, anywhere by another people. It may be downloaded from the web at the websites of any of the authors. Partners in Health may be found at www.pih.org. The RFK center at www.rfkmemorial.org and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at chrgj.org

Read it and weep with rage.

Copyright© 2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com