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John Maxwell

In 1989, before the General Elections of that year, the PNP Opposition accused Edward Seaga’s government of having a “Going out of business sale” of Jamaica’s assets, privatising left, right, and centre.

That sale was as nothing compared to the present ‘madness’ sale, initiated by P. J. Patterson and enthusiastically endorsed by Bruce Golding. If Seaga was selling the furniture, Patterson and Golding have been scrapping the house itself, selling the verandah, the doors and windows and the flooring.

The Jamaica Environment Trust and Vagabond Media , two entirely Jamaican organisations, have teamed up to produce a cool, calm documentary examination of the methodical, brutal and unsustainable development of the tourism industry of Jamaica.

What they say is not new: most Jamaicans already have a pretty good idea of what is happening. The wanton destruction of the Jamaican landscape, an integral component of the Jamaican “tourism product”, has made the pages of the New York Times, the National Geographic, countless internet blogs and lots of other places. What is new is that the whole horror story is presented about Jamaicans, by Jamaicans, for Jamaicans.

Jamaica for sale allows the Jamaican victims of our fantasy development to speak: the craft vendors, the construction workers, the hotel workers, the fishermen, hotel owners and managers and the ordinary citizens who see themselves under siege by unscrupulous people with much more money than sense and with no recognisable aesthetic or environmental values and no feeling for the Jamaican people or the Jamaican reality.

One of the construction workers says near the beginning of the video:

“Dem is like ticks ‘pon we back” an eloquent expression of the reality of the new tourism, parasitic and dangerous to health. The workers tell of dreadful working conditions, 12 hour days for $800 – below the already inadequate Jamaican minimum wage – and their employers are not poor companies. Their rules and laws are enforced by the Jamaican constabulary whose interest is not justice but “Law and Order.”

The people attracted to the worksites and to the tourism development areas find nowhere to live and many become squatters. Even the squatters in the wetlands are turfed off, bulldozers come by night and demolish their miserable dwellings, destroying their furniture, their few personal possessions and wrecking their lives. Their rivers, streams and beaches are polluted by wastes of all kinds. I have taken photographs of human excrement in the sea at the formerly pristine Pear Tree Bottom Beach. What remains of the gazetted public beach and public fishing beach is now off limits to the public, by the illegal order of the National Works Agency which has erected a sign warning that ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’.

In Negril there is a new development afoot that will reconstruct the coastline, building artificial inlets and beaches al la Dubai – to maximise their profit at the expense of the Jamaican environment which, in this area, is largely unexploited and unspoiled.

One Negril hotelier, a Jamaican, with tears in his voice, describes the plight of workers whose children have no schools and who have to take two or three buses to get to work, spending up to a third of their meagre wages on transportation. There is, he laments, no social development to match the commercial development.

All this despite the alleged fact that Tourism is Jamaica’s leading earner of foreign exchange.

But where does this foreign exchange go? The craft vendors complain that hotel guests are warned off the Jamaica outside the hotels: they will be robbed and murdered – they are told. So the few who venture outside are mobbed by vendors and others wanting a piece of the action, terrifying hotel guests who have been comprehensively warned of the badness of the people they will meet outside.

The video was shot before the tourist mecca of Ocho Rios was overwhelmed by mudslides and human excrement from the unplanned squatter settlements above the town. No one seems to have learned anything from this disaster. There are no plans to build a new town for the thousands of people who need accommodation, many of whom work in the hotels but who live in subhuman conditions or have to travel miles to work every day.

The current worldwide economic disaster will eventually catch up with the lunacies of fantasy development. The price of oil will increase rapidly as it becomes more scarce and will put airlines and cruise-ships out of business. But, sadly, not before we transform beautiful Jamaican towns like Falmouth into tourist only communities ‘attractions’ a la Colonial Williamsburg and Disneyland. These guys are not only stealing beaches, they are stealing whole towns.

In the meantime the burgeoning people-processing industry is busy destroying the foundation on which its real attraction is built. The bozos who are building the monstrous concrete ramparts by the sea were attracted to Jamaica because it is Jamaica, but they are determined, like other uncivilised people, to distort and deform what is natural but foreign to them to suit their tiny-minded fantasies of ‘Treasure Island’ and similar mythical European versions of paradise. They will mistreat wild animals like dolphins and killer whales until they go extinct, like the tigers which now mainly and for the time being may only be found in zoos.

Eating biodiversity

On the hotel coast there is another serious threat to the Jamaican environment. Imported foreign workers have discovered that we have snakes and turtles and they are eating them to extinction. The hotels are closing down turtle nesting sites and hotel excrement and spoil are killing our reefs at an increasing pace. In the video, fishermen from all along the north and west coasts are complaining that the reefs are dying, fouled by over-fertilisation from the hotels or other land based sources of pollution.

The beaches themselves are going, either stolen by the truckload by night or destroyed by interference with the sea-floor or the wetlands that nourish the beaches. In the video one man testified to what I know from personal experience. Even a few years ago, the beaches in Negril, alone in all Jamaica, extended up to a hundred meters into the sea. Today, the sea-floor at Negril is no longer sandy but mainly mud. As we told the Urban Development Corporation more than 30 years ago, most of Negril’s sand was made by argillaceous algae, “seaweed” that absorbed calcium from the water and crystallised it as flakes of ‘sand’ which gave Negril’s beaches their unique powdery feel. If these flakes of calcium carbonate are not constantly refreshed by the algae, the beaches will die – as they have died.

Part of this problem arose from the UDC’s determination to use the Negril Morass as a sink for hotel sewage, poisoning the South Negril River which nourished the argillaceous algae.

Another problem with Negril is that the UDC – unlike King Canute – refused to believe that they could not control the tides. We at the Natural Resources Conservation Authority told them thirty years ago that they should not build a groyne at the point on which Hedonism Two (then Negril Beach Village) was sited. At that time, NRCA had an oceanographer on staff, a Jamaican who became so fed up with the bureaucracy’s unwillingness to listen to reason that he gave up and went off to study law instead. The illegal UDC groyne interrupted the flow of sand from the north of the seven mile strip, thus interfering with the supply of regular sand that provided the foundation for the powdery flakes from the south. Between these two deficits, Negril’s famous beaches are now reduced to thin, mostly muddy strips, attracting hosts of sandflies (Sandflies, paradoxically, prefer mud to sand).

Now, on the North coast, hoteliers who do not steal sand from other beaches dredge it from beyond the reefs that guard the coast.

Since the living corals preserve the integrity of the inshore beaches, subtracting sand from the seaward side of dead reefs will eventually undermine them and destroy them. At that time, the beaches built by theft or by illegal dredging will disappear and ‘Jamaica – No Problem” will become ‘Jamaica – Big Problem’.

Unknown to the foreign hoteliers, Jamaica was always more than a beach. In a few years they will discover what life is like without beaches. The vulgar people processing plants on the cutting edge of unsustainable development will be besieged by rising seas in their lobbies and and storm surge on their third and fourth floors.

Then perhaps, we can build a sound tourism industry on the rubble of our fantasy hotels, new reefs, manmade and offering accommodation to starfish and swarms of jellyfish.

The video Jamaica for Sale, is much more polite than this column and its producers are not responsible for my comments. But I urge you to see the video when it is next shown on television sometime in December. Before that there will be a special fundraising showing at the Red Bones Cafe You should look out for notices in the press.

Walk good and take care where you swim.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: awake

In the first flush of her Cinderella epiphany, Sarah Palin impudently dismissed Barack Obama as a community organiser. She was right in describing the function, wrong in assuming that scope of his organising was south-side Chicago. It turns out, after Tuesday’s elections, that Obama had been organising his entire national community and perhaps others outside.

Overnight, Obama became the human face of the United States of America; not a red or blue America, not a white or black America but what Obama, in the audacity of his hope called “the United States of America” – a construct not of states and institutions, but of people. As his former rival Hilary Clinton declared on Tuesday night: "We are celebrating an historic victory for the American people."

His own people got the message, as did a substantial proportion of the peoples outside the USA.

Free at Last ?

The statistics tell some of the story:

First time voters Obama won overwhelmingly – 69% to McCain’s 30%

Men – slightly more –49% – voted for Obama than for McCain – 48%

Women – Obama won a big maJority of the women’s vote – 56% to 43% for McCain

Ethnicity – McCain won 55% of white voters to Obama’s 43%. Obama won more white voters than either Kerry (2004) or Al Gore (2000)

Obama, as might have been expected, was backed by almost every black voter – 95% –and 20% more of them turned out than is usual. Obama won overwhelmingly among Hispanics – 66% – and Asians – 62%

Age – Obama won 66% of voters under 30, 53% of voters between 30 and 44; tied with McCain –49% each – among voters 45 to 59 while McCain won the majority only among the oldest voters, those over 60 years, at 52% to Obama’s 46%

Education – Obama won a majority among all classes, with his largest majority 63% among those who were not graduates of high school and between 51% and 53% of high school graduates and those with some college education and college graduates.

Religion – McCain won 54% of the Protestant vote and 55% of those who go to church at least once a week. Among Catholics Obama won 53% and 77% of Jews gave him their votes.

Location – In big cities Obama won big majorities – 71%, and in small cities, 59%. In the suburbs he beat McCain by two points – 50% to 48%. Only in small towns and rural areas did McCain win – 53%.

These figures strongly suggest that Barack Obama has been the most cosmopolitan vote getter in the history of elections in the USA.

And he is the first since Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson whose election did not depend on carefully selected subsets of the American demography. He has in fact uprooted the carefully constructed Republican blueprint for electoral domination -prejudicial redistricting enforced by carefully selected judges.

This process has over the last thirty years, has made the US House of Representatives almost immune to change with a majority of seats having been made safe by gerrymandering. In April In New York state, for example, there was great consternation when a Democrat won a seat held by Republicans since 1939. That was my first clue that Obama was likely to be elected President, that there was an insurrection afoot.

I expect that the new US president and the congress will take steps to abolish this ‘rotten borough’ system and put new life into the electoral process.

One malign result of the process of embedding permanent representatives is that the Republicans have a built in electoral advantage

The most malignant result of this long-term process has been the increasing politicisation of the US Supreme Court in support of a fundamentalist theological agenda, delicately racist and intolerant of modernity.

A Sea Change

On the first day of 2008 I circulated a letter from Michael Moore to people on my mailing list. Moore’s letter , entitled ‘Who shall we vote for?’ was Moore’s evaluation of the candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Moore didn’t settle on one candidate, he seemed divided between Hilary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama. He would actually gone for Dennis Kucinich if he had any real chance. So would I, and my second choice was John Edwards.

Up to that point I had not taken Obama very seriously, partly because I knew so little about him. But in reply to Moore’s letter I got this

“Hi John-

I agree with Moore up to a point, but what we need foremost in this country, after getting out of Iraq, is the humble reintroduction of the US into the community of nations in the world; and Mr. Obama is the best one to accomplish that. Hillary is too inside the system, Edwards too focused internally. Both would be infinitely better than W. But Obama is the future, and he looks like the rest of the world. My hope is that the kids, Jackson's crowd who are enthralled by him, will actually VOTE!! All the best and Love-KJA”

Kurt Adams is a commercial airline pilot who has had a long love affair with Jamaica. I was fortunate enough to meet him on one of his periodic visits to this country. He is also a nephew of Kurt Vonnegut, a writer for whom I have the greatest respect and affection.

Kurt Adams was accompanied by his son Jackson, a serious but lively young man with wide and various intellectual interests.

So when Kurt told me that Jackson and his friends were impressed by Obama, I decided to look at the man more closely. Despite my ideological preference for Edwards I soon became a supporter of Obama. I thought he was as Kurt said, the future.

Like most Jamaicans my age I have had a long and serious interest in the United States. It would be hard not to.

Fifty years ago, in March 1959, I was on a US State Department fellowship in the United States. I was supposed to have been attached to an American news agency, a newspaper or a television or radio station. Unfortunately none could be found to accommodate a young black male from jamaica.

My fellowship was transformed into a series of visits to various news organisations in the eastern US. My ‘handler’ was a great guy named David Hoopes. We enjoyed an easy camaraderie. just before i was due to leave the US David gave me lunch at a restaurant on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. a place that my black American acquaintances had never entered, despite the fact that Washington had recently been ‘integrated’. The only blacks welcomed in these places were the diplomats from Ghana and Guinea, then newly independent.

After a lively conversation about my experiences David asked me what I though of the future of race relations in the United States.

At the age of 25 the stories I’d heard in school about race and discrimination in the US had been reinforced by my contacts with black Americans. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement was then ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’.

In my sophomoric certainty I told David hoopes that I saw no possibility of blacks and white coexisting peacefully in the US. In fact I said that the only solution I could see was one put forward by the ‘Black Muslims’ – the nation of islam, who had demanded that blacks should be given two US states to run as their own country.

Times changed, and the civil rights movement changed the United States. In Jamaica we marched with King as he marched on Washington, we mourned and were outraged by Selma, by the Birmingham bombings and the murders of Goodman and Schwerner and Chaney and Medgar Evers and all the others.

I was at the residence of the US charge d’affaires in Stony Hill when he feted Martin Luther king in 1963, when King said that in Jamaica, a black country, he had felt like a full human being for the first time in his life.

The patent racism of George H.W./ Bush and the pusillanimity of Clinton on the question of Haiti was bad enough but the lies, deception and murderous assault of George Bush on Iraq followed by the brutal, unthinking decapitation of Haitian democracy were for some of us, the last straws. Rwanda, Darfur, HIV/AIDS were, to mangle a metaphor, simply the scum on top of a noxious brew.

There seemed to be no hope that the United States would rejoin the modern world anytime soon.

Singer Man

Some of Obama’s intention may be judged by the fact that in his acceptance speech on Tuesday night he incorporated themes and cadences from Shakespeare’s Henry V, from Abraham Lincoln, from John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Before Obama has even named his transition team, republicans and journalists are busy projecting his future actions and policies. To some he is the all-purpose villain; to others the all-purpose hero. Fortunately for most of us he is clearly his own man

It is clear that he has three priorities; the people, the economy and the world.

As Medgar Evers widow, Myrlie, says, Obama is blessed with wisdom, courage, grace and det termination, among other qualities which equip him to speak for everyone, to become the singer-man for his people’s idelism, their hopes and deepest aspirations.

Already he is movng on programmes to tackle unemployment, disinvestment and poverty, planning for comprehensive health care, while concurrently dealing with the financial meltdown, coralling the banks and employing drastic solutions to slow down and stop the recession. And while all this is happening he has to deal with ending the war in Iraq and prosecuting the war in Afghanistan.

As somebody has said, a great many people believe that Obama has been elected ‘Saviour’

Fortunately for al of us, Obama’s strategic thinking does not depend on the supernatural. His experience and his upbringing all tell him that nothing is more powerful than the mobilised power of the community.

His campaign, with its thousands of volunteers, its millions of small contributors is the best proof of that.

All I hope for is that in this crowded agenda, somewhere, there is space for the reparation of Haiti, the place where universal human rights was first implemented in the modern world, and where, in savage injustice, the United States has, over two hundred years, imposed its will to deny the Haitians their freedom.

There is nowhere a more urgent or deserving case for redemption than Haiti. It is time for a change there too.

And that I suppose, makes me another special pleader.

So be it.

jankunnu@gmail.com

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.

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.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: calm

Count No Chickens

John Maxwell
Sunday, October 19, 2008

Barring some transcendental upheaval, some unforeseeable catastrophe or the kind of unconscionable 'October Surprise' to which the US Republican party is so addicted, John McCain has almost no chance of being elected president of the United States. This is despite one of the nastiest, most dishonourable election campaigns ever conducted anywhere.

Months ago, during the Democratic Party primaries, I predicted in this column that this would be the dirtiest election campaign in American history. It was worse than that - dirtier than any election campaign I have ever heard of.

John McCain, unfortunately, has never heard of David Coore's first law of holes: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Instead, he recruited battalions of assistant diggers and welcomed the contributions of hundreds if not thousands more eager volunteers with the result that, approaching the end of his final election campaign, he has lost electoral support, public respect, his own honour and the prospect of enjoying in in public admiration and goodwill in his sunset years.

I know the exact moment when I realised that McCain had lost the election. It was during the second debate with Obama and I was watching, as I always do, the little meter at the bottom of the TV screen which reflects the feelings of a specially selected group of uncommitted viewers. I soon realised that while there were clearly favourable and adverse reactions to Obama, for McCain the meter mostly remained flat.

I thought this was a little odd and wondered if the meter wasn't working, because I expected some reaction when McCain said something I thought they may have disliked. But no, the meter flatlined for most of his time. The uncommitted had effectively tuned him out.

THE LEADERSHIP DILEMMA

I am writing this column before the final debate, but I don't expect it to be any different from the others. There will be some reaction when McCain makes some particularly outrageous statement, but as far as real content is concerned I am expecting the meter to flatline for most of McCain's arguments.

This is a pity, because the world deserves to hear serious argument from aspiring leaders of "the free world". We're not going to get it for two reasons: one is John McCain's formidable inadequacies; the other is the structure of the US political system. The American president is effectively an elected king. Some, like Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) considered it important to enjoy the "consent of the governed". Others, most notably Nixon and Bush/Cheney, consider the governed to be an inconvenient nuisance to be ignored whenever practicable.

Constitutionally, the president is as carefully segregated as possible from party. The parties are hobbled by the carefully engineered disconnect between the hoi polloi - in the House of Representatives - elected every two years, and the Senate, elected in tranches - one-third every two years - so that popular feeling, enthusiasms and indignations, are as diluted as possible and the status quo is massively immobile.

Even presidents elected by landslides like Johnson, Reagan and Clinton, find it extremely difficult to promulgate the mandates they appeared to have been given by the body politic and to fulfil the promises they made.

Only a president with very long coat-tails may find sufficient support among his party/coalition to implement anything that resembles what the people want.

Between the will and the deed are the inertia of long-serving conservatives and some notable boobies in both parties on the one hand, and on the other, the millionaire journalists who claim to represent the public interest.

Media monopolies chain them to conservative positions, manacled by ephemeral privilege based on an irrefrangible sense of obligation to their masters. This may be why the US media, almost alone in the world, played pied piper for George Bush in Iraq and for Alan Greenspan in his dour pavane to economic and financial disaster. It may be why some areas of blatant and obscene injustice get such short shrift in the US press: the continuing torture of the Palestinians, the subjection and rape of Haiti, the economic and social exploitation of Africa and Latin America, and the continuing injustice of the Iraq war are mainly publicised only in the blogs, the flourishing outhouses of the American press.

In such a ménage, any presidential candidate would be cutting his own throat were he not to promise eternal fealty to Israel; the idea that he might talk to Iran or Cuba without preconditions is as bizarre as the idea of Lyndon Johnson recognising China.

China was recognised, by Nixon of all people, and - even more bizarre - the American banking system is even now being nationalised by George Bush and the former chairman of Goldman Sachs.

Nothing, they say, happens before its time.

Barack Obama has proven that he can organise, build coalitions and mobilise masses of people. If he becomes president the question is whether he will be able to organise himself and the United States out of the abyss into which they have been plunged by imperial capitalism.

The British, followed by the Europeans and finally the Americans, have recognised that social institutions that are as massively integral to civilised life as the banks cannot be allowed to operate their own planet. That is why they have nationalised the banking system - or the most important parts - and why the taxpayers across the Atlantic will have representation on the controlling boards of the financial institutions.

But even as the United States has surrendered its right to elect the head of the World Bank, the multilateral financial institutions still stand as a massive roadblock between the public and those who are technically accountable for the management of our financial affairs. These institutional usurers will continue to say, with straight faces, that countries like Jamaica which have never defaulted are less worthy of credit than Bear Stearns, for example, or Donald Trump.

PUBLIC ENTERPRISE

Mr McCain speaks about greed and cupidity, apparently completely unaware that while we have greed and cupidity always with us, we do not need to carry around the parasitic weight of greedy and irresponsible moneychangers who produce nothing but propaganda on behalf of their class. The next few years, particularly in Britain and Europe, will demonstrate that it is possible to manage gargantuan economies and intricate trading arrangements without the necessity of creating billionaires out of bookkeepers.

At the same time, in the case of the Europeans, with more democratic systems of government - at least more responsive to the popular will -important segments of the power structure will once again be in the hands of the people's representatives. The state, which is us, has paid - coming and going - for the extravagances of our bookkeepers. Now that we have real equity in the system itself, the question is whether and why we would again be crazy enough to surrender the commanding heights of the economy to hysterical gangs of pirates, gamblers, sociopaths and common criminals.

In the United States the intent is that when the delinquent and incompetent elements of the system have been restored to financial health and good hygiene, they will again be privatised. Some Americans regard Franklin Delano Roosevelt - a real American aristocrat - as a Communist, because he believed that great wealth did not confer sainthood. He thought that the world should be a rational place, run on behalf of everybody.

He was not a leveller, not the sort of person who Bustamante alleged would cut pigs and goats in half to fulfil some insane idea of egalitarianism. He was not even a democratic socialist or even close to it. He believed in capitalism, which he thought was a civilised system which could take care of all and provide good living for many if the essential rules were enforced.

But he died (10 years younger than John McCain is now) at the apex of his achievements, just before the end of the Second World War, and people less wise than he allowed, and some aided and abetted, the parasitic and strangulatory growth of what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex and its efflorescence, Imperial Capitalism. This increasing cohabitation between the military and finance capital is the centre of the system which has now demonstrated so graphically, its moral, ecological, political, economic and military failure. In its febrile greed and acquisitiveness it bribed and blackmailed its workers and customers to expect irrational and unrealistic living standards based entirely on the ravaging of natural resources and the ruthless exploitation of subject peoples. These injustices require in turn, or are said to require, enormous parasitic military and industrial establishments essentially meant to keep the natives in their places, whether in Moscow, Havana, Milwaukee or Kingston. To protect the primacy of the United States, the neo-cons conjured up a dream of total domination - American lebensraum in a world denominated by the principles of the 'Bell Curve' and dominated by the essential wickedness of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of self - über alles.

It worked for Alan Greenspan and fortified the animal spirits of his disciples in Goldman Sachs and similar joints. It cannot work for the rest of us, because if we are all to live according to those principles we would require the resources of three planets just like this one.

As Imperial Capitalism attempts to rework itself into its former positions of absolute power it will have to accomplish this with our cooperation.

Especially if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States it will become increasingly clear to the majority of us that we have the solutions in our own heads and the means in our own hands.

As we watch the process and begin to take a more active part in it, we will begin to understand the enormity of our own servitude and the need, in the worlds of Norman Manley, to 'dis-enthrall ourselves'.

To be enthralled is not only to be seized by rapturous adoration, it is also to be enslaved, to abandon freedom and liberty in favour of self-administered lobotomy - to be infatuated with death.

Walk good!

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.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Location: At home
Current Music: NPR

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.

jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell
Sunday, September 21, 2008

Billions of people are scared out of their minds that the world as they know it might disappear at any moment, because of the financial turmoil rapidly spreading globally. To these people wealth is an abstraction, something possessed by somebody else. Few realise that it is they, the workers and peasants of the world, who create wealth and that the world's financial system is a means of abstracting it from the poor, consolidating it and consuming it in ways that the creators would find fantastic.

A few years ago, I wrote of the British millionaire, Maurice Saatchi, who paid $1 million for a sealed tin of the excrement of an Italian artist. The tin, like money, has whatever value the rich place on it.
On Friday morning the American Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulsen, announced that he and other movers and shakers in Washington had agreed on a once-and-for-all fix to the current financial problem, to abort the threatening meltdown and the disruption of the world economy.

It is clear from Paulsen's words that the rich are again to be rescued by the poor, as is normal and as will continue to be normal under our systems of governance.

Paulsen made it clear that the centre of the problem, in his view, were trillions of dollars worth of "illiquid assets" in the form of dead mortgages and derivative financial gimmicks fashioned from those assets. The answer, for Paulsen, is to clear the logjam of illiquid assets so that the financial system can continue its cannibalistic career.

The capitalist market is supposedly infallible, until, as now and in 1994, 1987, 1939, and many times before, its corruption, incompetence and lunacies convince even the most ardent devotees that they have run out of magical incantations and can no longer walk on water.

It is again time to summon the government, the state, the people, to the rescue of the rich and infamous.

The patron saints of modern capitalism, Reagan and Thatcher, believed that the state - government - was 'the enemy' and their pathetic apologists all over the world, parrot their barbaric ideas as the new religion. 'Privatise, Liberalise and Deregulate' is the mantra, government must get out of the way, until the so-called Free-Market Express is periodically and regularly derailed by its own excesses.
Paulsen and company justify their actions by invoking the idea that some institutions are simply too big to fail, so the state must rescue them. The irresistible corollary to some of us is that if they are too big and important to fail, they should obviously be under social control and not left to the machinations of gamblers, criminals and lunatics in search of a get-rich-quick fix.

In Thatcher's primitive philosophy, there was no such thing as society and Alan Greenspan, the real architect of the current disaster, is a disciple of Ayn Rand who taught that self-interest and selfishness are the prime virtues.

The purveyors of this sort of garbage are usually quiet during periods of capitalistic collapse, only to begin their prattle when the poor have once again licensed them to steal and defraud.

Capitalism is not, of course, the same as free enterprise. Every human being is - in his own way - an entrepreneur. Adam Smith, the messiah of capitalism, in his utopian vision saw an 'invisible hand' which would ensure that markets were free and fair, that resources were allocated according to just principles and that everyone would be happy with the result. He also forecast that wherever two or three businessmen were gathered they would almost immediately begin to plot against the public interest. Sadly, he had no remedies for that.

CYCLES OF EXCESS AND DESPAIR

In our world, the result has been regular cycles of boom and bust. Capitalism depends on three main factors:
1) Cheap labour
2) Cheap natural resources and
3) Armed force to restrain the prices of both.

The system has worked perfectly in the United States. In 1944, corporate income tax provided seven per cent of the American GDP. Five years ago it was down to 1.2 per cent. The compensation of workers has fallen from 65 per cent of GDP to about 45 per cent while the compensation of the rich has multiplied like a particularly aggressive cancer.

The US Chamber of Commerce is even now pleading for a reduction in the rate of US corporate tax, although most American corporations pay little or no tax at all. The corporations carried out a deliberate campaign against the public interest terrorising workers and unions by threat of unemployment and when that was no longer effective, moving the jobs abroad.

It did not seem to have occurred to them that their workers were the market on which their profits depended. Ignorant of both economics and demography, they did not realise that while Chinese, Indian and Haitian workers could produce at costs way below the US, they could not afford to buy the products they made.

The present crisis originated in the plan to exploit the poorest sectors of the US middle classes by offering mortgages to people at what were touted to be bargain rates and then to increase the rates to unpayable levels.

The theory was that the lender would make money on the usurious repayments and when those ended, would still have the asset value of the house to play with. Calculations like these depended on a constantly rising level of house values, and when the downsizing of companies and the outsourcing of jobs began to bite, the mortgagors were jobless, in debt and unable to pay. The mortgage companies - by these means - managed to extract billions of dollars from those most in need and carted away a substantial proportion of the savings of the black and minority communities in the United States.

In the United States, as in Jamaica and a host of other countries following fashion, the result has been the transfer of enormous amounts of wealth from the poor to the rich, and the slowing down and eventual stopping of real economic activity.

The result in the United States is that the poor taxpayer/consumer/worker must now mortgage his soul to rescue the very people who exploited him.

One of the prime ironies of the present situation is that the capitalists have insisted that governments should borrow from the private sector and should not engage in deficit financing or as they called it, 'printing money'. That privilege was to be surrendered to the private sector, whose unbridled greed has resulted in a curious situation, described on Friday morning by the US treasury secretary. There were institutions, he said, who were unable to determine the value of their illiquid assets; they were so 'leveraged' employing such arcane financial instruments that they have no real idea of how much money they owe or are owed. This is fantasy - No-Risk Capitalism.

It would seem to me, as I said earlier, that when private enterprise proves that it cannot manage some of the functions it has wrested from the state, the state must insist on new structures of management, owned and regulated by the state, the one entity too big to fail.
It will cost all of us a lot less.

DIGGING DOWN JAMAICA

I am a member of the Tribunal appointed under the Access to Information Act, assigned the duty of deciding whether the public is entitled to certain government documents and information. In proceedings last year, the commissioner of mines attempted to prevent the disclosure of maps and surveys defining mined-out land and land slated for mining by the bauxite companies.

The commissioner employed a novel argument: such information, he said, was regarded as confidential in the mining industry worldwide, protected by a 'convention or protocol' which prohibited
its publication.

Our investigations produced no evidence of any such protocol or convention and in fact, we discovered that the mining industry is busy making its affairs more transparent, for the benefit of investors and the public.

The commissioner of land and the Jamaica Bauxite Institute appear to regard themselves as defenders of the bauxite companies against the interest of the Jamaican public. According to the Mining Law, bauxite companies are obliged to rehabilitate all mined-out land, restoring the topsoil and bringing it back into some semblance of fertility.

The mining companies have over the last 50 years, disobeyed the law and left thousands of acres unrestored. Under the law, Jamaica is owed millions of US dollars for this illegal negligence.

The commissioner of lands has said that they do not intend to prosecute. The Bauxite Institute has been silent on the matter.
I believe that the Public Defender, the Contractor General and perhaps the Attorney General should take up this issue in the interests of the Jamaican people.

The powers that be, whoever they are, have apparently agreed that a consortium of companies - including Marc Rich interests, the Chinese and others - are to be given permission to establish a new alumina refinery in St Ann.

In nearly 60 years of bauxite mining, St Ann has gone from being one of the richest parishes in Jamaica to the absolute poorest, has gone from being the 'Garden parish' of beautiful, rolling hills and dales to a disfigured moonscape with thousands of acres of useless land, destroyed communities and the highest rate of teenage suicides in Jamaica.

The new alumina refinery will need to find somewhere to store three million tonnes of toxic waste every year, or 30,000 tonnes of waste per employee per annum.

St Ann is part of the Cockpit country aquifer, the biggest and most important in Jamaica. The US Corps of Engineers 10 years ago declared that it could not believe that future bauxite refining was possible in Jamaica, because of the danger of red mud to our water supplies.

Next week I hope to tell you about the threat of the new bauxite mining regime to a globally important, enormously valuable Jamaican asset, one worth billions more than bauxite.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Somewhere on Earth
Current Music: NPR

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.

jankunnu@gmail.com.

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

Current Mood: angry
Current Location: At home
Current Music: NPR

John Maxwell

I consider myself something of an authority on American comic book characters, ever since, nearly a hundred years ago, I was forced to spend months in hospital, aged ten, with tubes coming out of various parts of me, while my innards were reconstructed just in case I survived.

I survived because the surgeon, a great man named Herbert Morrison, saved my life with his skill and a new drug called penicillin. In those days, during the second world war, very limited supplies of the new wonder drug were available outside of the war zones. The British apparently sent a few doses out to special doctors in the colonies, for testing i.e for use on cases for whom there was no hope.

But I did acquire a huge collection of comics and my fascination with this art form has persisted. It also may explain why I see many politicians as comic book characters and why I had been looking forward to the celestial pairing of those quintessential bumblers Elmer Fudd and Mr Magoo at the top of the Republican party ticket. The combination of John McCain and Joe Lieberman seemed too good to be true and it would have happened had Mr Fudd not decided on a Captain Marvel type transformation into Daddy Warbucks and in the nick of time – found his Little Orphan Annie.

The problem of course s that Little Orphan Annie may be a political suicide bomber in disguise, carrying baggage too toxic for the fans

US Republican politics often reminds me of a horror comic scripted by Dale Carnegie and drawn by Gahan Wilson, where the monsters are all on their best behaviour as they delicately dismember some cherished principle of American democracy.

Principles are fungible; foreign policy experience is absolutely essential, until Daddy Warbucks espies Little Orphan Annie, who is very aware that when she sits in the Alaska Governor’s office, Russia is everything to the left and is a Very Bad Place, chock full of Very Bad Men. Little Orphan Annie is so cute she doesnt need to know anything about foreign oolicy, except never to find herself alone with that bad Mr Putin.

If you are an American it is deemed sexist to criticise Governor Palin. She makes tough decisions, decisions that mere men could not dare. One such is to leave her newborn son Trig, four days after his birth, to go back to work. Trig, with Downs Syndrome, will need a mother’s love for much longer than most babies and if he were breast-fed, might have a much better chance of survival and living a useful life.

But Sarah Palin is off to help McCain capture the women’s vote, the feminist vote; the Hillary Clinton discontents who, we imagine will admire her Amazon self-denial, her NRA membership, her hunting prowess; her opposition to the protection of Polar Bears, and her opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

She is indeed a tough cookie, turning not a hair as it is announced that her 17 year old daughter is pregnant and that despite that news, Mrs Palin still opposes sex education for kids. The governor announces that the boyfriend involved is to marry the girl – perhaps to his own surprise – and he is flown to Minneapolis to be part of the Palin family welcome to John McCain. His airport abrazo with McCain should live long on YouTube.

The Emperor McCain

John McCain’s Elmer Fudd public persona conceals a reality that may of course, surprise and perhaps even frighten some people.

For more than a decade he has been the President of the International Republican Institute (IRI), an outfit that operates its own maverick and sometimes violent foreign policy. it is the sort of outfit which goes into action, gets out of its depth and then calls 911 at the Pentagon, to come rescue them and keep US democracy looking good.

People who may have been surprised by McCain’s warlike declaration that he was ‘a Georgian” at the height of the failed Georgian blitzkrieg, may not have realised that Mr McCain’s IRI along with the CIA, the Israelis and other assorted neofascist troublemakers were an integral element of the Georgians attempt to incorporate South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia and provide a more secure path for Central Asian oil to Turkey and eventually Israel and the US.

I and many others, wondered at Mr Mc Cain’s presence in Colombia a few weeks before that, shortly after the end of the Republican primaries. Then,while he was there, there was a great hullaballoo about the freeing of FARC captives by the Colombian government and its allies. Surprisingly, Mr McCain’s IRI was never mentioned in dispatches nor was he included in the celebrations, although he was pictured smiling smugly, as if he knew something the rest of us didn’t. Could it have had anything to do with the illegal use of Red Cross paraphernalia?

And the IRI was spectacularly involved with the failed anti-Chavez coups in Venezuela. about which a discreet silence may be the best policy.

In Haiti, the IRI led the racist assault on democracy and Aristide. The IRI retains a commanding position in the American takeover of a sovereign nation where life gets ever more interesting and more desperate every day

Hurricanes and rainstorms kill more people in Haiti than in most other places for one reason: the democratic leadership has been destroyed. The institutions and community arrangements by which other societies protect themselves are broken. The President is in forced exile, other leaders have been murdered or exiled and one in particular, Dr Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, has been kidnapped and has not been heard from for more than a year.

The destruction of the Haitian polity and economy means starvation for the people. While people eat dirt and die of hunger the IRI and its allies are moving to improve their image and strategic position, and no doubt, build more swimming pools.

The latest initiative is the open but totally illegal capture of land owned by Haitians in Cite Soley, for the building of what seems likely to be the American answer to Christophe’s Citadel.

Perhaps someone might ask Daddy Warbucks if he knows anything at all about all this activity?

And, if he does, what does he think about it?

Racism, chauvinism and sport

The gulf between writers and hacks is nowhere greater than in the field of sports. There are those who not only know their subjects backwards but are poets and gracious human beings as well. And there are those who are the real offspring of the economic prostitution of sport.

These are people who don’t bother to know their subject, are hopelessly chauvinistic and spiteful towards people they regard as somehow unworthy Some of this is racist as the Williams sisters discovered at the height of their glory. The Olympics provided a showcase for some of these sarcoptic flies of journalism.

The worst that I saw was one Rick Maese of the Baltimore Sun whose interest was to denigrate Usain Bolt

“Last week I cast skepticism on Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt's incredible feats at these Olympics -- shattering the world records in both the 100 and 200 meters. Not surprisingly, there were some who disagreed, who want to believe that Bolt earned that record through hard work, powerful homegrown yams and his pre-race Chicken McNuggets. Admittedly, I'd love to believe that too. Unfortunately, I just can't.”

He can’t because he hasn’t bothered to do his homework. According to this bozo:

Put simply, Phelps' growth curve is a bit different and the testing standards for his home nation are significantly different. Bolt entered these Games as a curiosity, while Phelps had long ago established himself as swimming's version of a bull in a world-record shop.

Maese does make a slight bow in the direction of fairness “This isn't to suggest that Bolt wasn't also a rising star (in fact, at 16, he was the youngest world champion ever). But their respective paths were different. For most of his competitive life, when Phelps wasn't performing in the swimming pool, he was performing for doping officials behind closed doors.

“For the sake of accuracy, Bolt has also faced plenty of tests. After winning his third gold medal of these Games, here's what he said: "I've been tested so many times in the competition I've lost count. We know we're good, we know we're clean. We work hard and any time you want to test us, it's OK."

Here's the difference: The United States has a much more stringent testing program. Jamaica doesn't even have an accredited anti-doping system. The only times many athletes there -- and in many other countries -- are tested is when they're in actual competition.”

Garbage!

More reprehensible was the space given in the San Diego Union Tribune to the notorious corrupter of the young, the druggist Victor Conte, who, in a perfect world would be spending the rest of his life in some workhouse contemplating the lives and careers he helped to ruin and working to make amends to the idea of sportsmanship he did so much to smear. Instead, this blood-sucking parasite is allowed to recklessly libel Jamaica and its athletes, finding a ready audience in a nation that finds it hard to believe in the integrity of anyone or anything.

Conte reminds me of Ogden Nash’s cobra, who

‘fills his mouth with venum.

and walks upon his duodenum.”

“In December, Conte says, he met with former World Anti-Doping Agency chief Dick Pound and provided details – name, address, phone number – of a drug dealer providing banned substances to Jamaican track athletes. Pound passed along the information to his successors at WADA, who have indicated that protocol requires such data be forwarded to that country's anti-doping agency.”

The suggestion is that the Jamaican authorities are complicit in athletic corruption.

I would be surprised if Conte were not the creep who posted that infamous parcel to Beijing, addressed to The Jamaican team and allegedly full of dope.

Creatures like Conte have a terrible thirst for justification, and if the Jamaicans prove that you don't need dope the Contes will be forced back into the compost heaps which are their natural habitat.

Meanwhile, Mr Conte should be forced in court, to prove the truth of his allegations or pay substantial sums to the Jamaican sporting authorities and the athletes.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: ill
Current Location: At home
Current Music: NPR

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>

Jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: At home
Current Music: NPR

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.

jankunnu@gmail.com

The complete CIBC World Markets report is available at:

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

Current Mood: sad
Current Location: In the hills
Current Music: Voice of the Jeremy

John Maxwell

As I’ve said many times in this column, journalists, whose main job is to advance and protect the human rights of other people, are among those whose own human rights are most in question.

For journalists, freedom of speech is more limited than for most. In the western world journalists can mostly say what they want, as long as they agree with the positions of their publishers. As readers of my column know, I have had several disagreements with Butch Stewart, publisher of this newspaper, but I haven't yet been stopped from airing them or from criticising him. Recent examples include my disagreement with the Observer’s non-publication of a public opinion poll before last year’s elections and my criticism of Butch Stewart's pre-election gift of $10 million to “NGO communities” just before the elections.

Contrast that with what happened at the Trinidad Guardian 12 years ago when the newspaper’s controlling shareholder, Anthony Sagba, decided that his newsroom was not competent to comment on the propriety of relationships between the Guardian's parent organisation and the government of Trinidad. As a result of that decision, 10 journalists left the paper and its reputation for journalistic probity was severely damaged.

The Gleaner, at the time, defended Mr Sagba as having made a ‘management decision’ and advised the journalists to cool it because it wasn’t their business. I commented in this paper that the Gleaner’s argument was hogwash.

Mr Sagba had no more right to tell his journalists what stories they could print than he would have had to walk into one of his company's supermarkets and walk out with a ham without paying for it. Mr Sagba, a shopkeeper by trade, should know that. Owning a newspaper gives him no more human rights than any other member of the public. And since newspapers are not human beings, they can have no human rights.

More than fifty years ago a reporter named Rupert Nash Herbert and I were the prime movers in organising the Jamaica Union of Journalists. The Gleaner refused to deal with us citing its ‘solus’ (monopoly) position in protection of the public interest against politicians, trade unionists, journalists and others intent on subverting the natural order.

They even managed to influence the Registrar General, Mr J. McDonald Sudu, who refused to register the trade union until threatened with mandamus proceedings by our attorney, Peter Evans.

Nothing we did could convince the Gleaner to negotiate with us. They dispatched those members of our executive who were members of their staff on assignment to journalistic Siberia: Alvin Wint to Montego Bay, Dudley Byfield to Mandeville and Wilmot Perkins to Morant Bay. They did not dare touch our president, a light skinned Jamaican lady named Aimee Webster.

Because of the Gleaner’s stance, Premier Norman Manley promised to legislate the compulsory recognition of trade unions. Unfortunately this did not come to pass for another 16 years, when Michael Manley was Prime Minister and enacted the Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act. This was in direct response to the Gleaner’s refusal to recognise another journalists’ union, this one led by Ben Brodie.

Jamaican journalists have good reason to be wary of their employers who have never been defenders of the essence of press freedom and freedom of expression. They will defend their corporate right to speak, but not mine nor that of any other independent journalist.

In 1964 the Gleaner’s Editor, Theodore Sealy, who also happened to be president of the Press Association, declared that the government had the right to discriminate against me, using public funds, because I had taken to “offensive extremes” my “defence of the public interest.”

And the Gleaner’s Managing Director, Gerry Fletcher, a vice president of the Inter American Press Association then meeting in Montego Bay, led their unanimous decision not to interfere in the dispute between my paper, Public Opinion, and the Government. They said they saw no question of press freedom involved. Prime Minister Bustamante, his Attorney General Victor Grant, and several of his ministers were publicly calling for me to be jailed and for one of my contributors to be deported. The Financial Secretary, Arthur Brown, was directed to issue a circular forbidding any government department or any entity in receipt of any government funds, including the Jamaica Agricultural Society and the University of the West Indies from advertising in Public Opinion or doing any business with the City Printery which owned the paper.

That PAJ coup

Last weekend members of the corporate media helped engineer a coup which unceremoniously bundled out the president of the Press Association, after five eventful years. Desmond Richards, according to the official count, received 12 out of 149 votes in the presidential election, although we had previously been informed by the presiding officer that only 137 people were entitled to vote. In fact 136 voted for the new President, Byron Buckley. I said I was reminded of elections in Tivoli Gardens, West Kingston, when Edward Seaga was the resident pasha.

I myself had been seriously heckled when I attempted to suggest before it was officially accepted that all was not kosher with the voters’ list.

My reasons were simple.

The Secretary of the PAJ and candidate for president, had managed to recruit the support of the managements of the Gleaner, the Observer, Radio Jamaica and Nationwide News and to get them to pay more than half a million dollars as registration fees for over 200 new members.

According to the constitution of the PAJ, applicants for membership must possess certain qualifications and be approved by the Executive Committee. I have not got an answer from the Secretary (now President) to my question as to when did the Executive approve the new members. And these new recruits, , without any legal right to be present, were vociferous in trying to deny me my right to ask these questions.

“We are here to vote, lets get on with it” was the general sentiment.

And vote they did.

Some people were seriously upset at Desmond’s not shaking the hand of the new president after the election. I though Des was wrong, but I understood his chagrin.

As an Honorary Life Member for more than two decades and with the added distinction of having been the only member ever to have been expelled – a decade before that – I enjoy a somewhat privileged historical position. Having become a member of he PAJ (1953) before all others now alive except fellow Life Members Fred and Cynthia Wilmot, I found the entire proceedings farcical and sad. And this is especially because Desmond had rescued the PAJ from wreckage and made it into a prize worth having.

The key tenet of the journalistic ethic in my view, after the duty to tell the truth, is the duty at all costs to preserve, protect and defend one’s own integrity. As journalists we are enjoined to accept favours from no one, lest even the merest suspicion of undue influence may be adduced from our behaviour.

And, since journalists’ first duty is to the truth and the defence of the public interest, not even the favour or influence of one’s employer is justifiable.

The public have a right to the truth, the unalloyed, unvarnished truth, however discomfiting or unpalatable to some. In an ideal journalistic world, employers should have no power to influence how the truth is presented or to be able to protect their friends and and associates and their interests.

There is, alas, no such ideal world, although in France and the Netherlands after the Nazi occupations, journalists insisted and got rights to freedom of expression even against their own employers. Incidentally, this question was one of the precipitating causes of the US embargo against Cuba, when newspaper employees demanded the right to add corrective ‘coletillas’ to false news carried by their papers.

When our disastrous experiment with imperial capitalism comes to its inevitable end the world will no doubt attempt to produce a public service press, beholden to nobody except its owners, the public interest.

Sadly, that day is not just around the corner. Meanwhile we tolerate the Judas goats like Judith Miller of the New York Times and the other journalist hucksters who have sung us into war, global warming, unsustainable development, competitive expenditure, sub-prime disasters and other catastrophes which could have been avoided, had the truth been made known.

Integrity in journalism is as essential as the integrity of the public water supply.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: At home

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.

jankunnu @gmail.com

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Where I am
Current Music: NPR

John Maxwell

It was an upstate New York banker named David Hannum and not the showman, P.T Barnum, who coined the expresion “There’s a sucker born every minute”. That seems peculiarly appropriate at this time, when banking has shed its sanctimonious pretensions and is now, unofficially but integrally, a part of show business.

Hannum’s aphorism occurred to me after seeing the cover of the latest New Yorker magazine. As most literate and illiterate people know by now, the New Yorker cover depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as two Muslim/Black Power terrorists,– in the White House Oval office congratulating themselves for comprehensively deceiving the American electorate and the Secret Service, and successfully achieving the multicultural; takeover of the United States presidency.

The Editor of the new Yorker, David Remnick contends that the cover is ‘obviously satire’ –a way of making fun of all the rumors. If it were not, he implies, it would be nothing but anti-Obama propaganda. And of course the New Yorker is way above that!

The alleged cartoonist, one Barry Blitt said: I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic [let alone as terrorists] in certain sectors is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is”. His boss, Remnick says the cartoon “uses the language of political satire and cartooning, not of reporting and essays, and sometimes not everyone likes that or gets what's intended. I would prefer not to over-explain things, but I'd rather be clear than there be lingering misconceptions about what Barry Blitt was exploring.”

How very quaint.

Not as quaint as those who like Andrew Malcolm in the Los Angeles Times and Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune, appear to have brains of pre-stressed concrete. Malcolm quotes Page approvingly “The Chicago Tribune respected columnist Clarence Page, an African American, said he found the cover "quite within the normal bounds of journalism."

Malcolm’s only problem seems to be that “… there's no caption on the cover to ensure that everyone gets the ha-ha-we've-collected-almost-every-cliched-rumor-about-Obama-in-one-place-in-order-to--make-fun-of-them punchline. “

Ha! and again, Ha!

And there are dozens of others who think the satire is obvious to those sophisticated enough to grasp it. as sophisticated as Kelly McBride who is Ethics Group Leader at The Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

In Poynteronline. She says “…Remnick's justification is a solid one, given the current political environment. Journalists are finding that no matter how much reporting they do, how many facts they uncover, false rumors won't die. That's what PolitiFact encountered when a researcher took on the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate.” Even with that fact embedded in her word processor, McBride says “The New Yorker's latest cover is deeply offensive or really funny or simply accurate, depending on your point of view. That's how satire works.” and she concludes “Satire is risky business. I'm glad there are plenty of professionals around doing it well and keeping it alive” That piece is titled “Satire’s new home in Journalism”.

I kid you not.

It was the sophisticates of course, who saw and appreciated the glorious magnificence of the Emperor’s new clothes – which existed only in their gullible, ‘with-it’ minds – the sort of minds that fuel every Ponzi scheme. There’s one born every minute as Mr Hannum said more than a century ago.

On the day of the New Yorker publication I drafted a letter on behalf of senior Caribbean journalists who, I thought might want to express their feelings on the matter. Only three replied, and one objected to my calling the cartoon a criminal libel. I removed the sentence, but even then only two were willing to go with the statement

Letter to the Editor of the New Yorker

“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 we have spoken to, 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.

Many 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 Caribbean journalists with over a hundred years of experience among us.

sgd John Maxwell

Canute James

Rickey Singh

I am not sure why only Canute James and Rickey Singh were willing to sign this letter, but I salute them

They are obviously aware of Aesop’s fable about the frog and the little boys who were throwing stones at it. “What is fun to you is death to me,” the frog said.

Someone who truly understands this principle is the intelectual authority of the Swift Boat campaign of the last US presidential election and the man whose signature on the New Yorker cartoon would have made its satirical intention plain and put the issue triumphantly to rest.

The missing signature, is of course that of Karl Rove.

Footnote 1

Successful political leaders need to have an exquisite sense of timing. The challenger to Portia Simpson Miller seems to have a tin ear for the music of politics. To challenge for the PNOP leadership at the height of the hurricane season, with a general election looming and the country in economic crisis seems to me more than stupid.

Footnote 2

The people who stole thousands of tons of sand from one of the loveliest beaches in Trelawny make, for them, a completely unexpected point: beaches are public property and should not be privatised. If al had access to the beach there would be no point in stealing sand. These thieves should be prosecuted rigorously and should ideally, serve a little time, ‘wetting dem foot’ as we say.

Jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Here, as usual
Current Music: NPR

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>

Current Mood: sombre
Current Location: On earth, as it is in hell
Current Music: NPR

John Maxwell

My first piece for this paper, 12 years and about 700 columns ago, was called “Watching Ideas Burn”. It was about the confluence of unsustainable development and dysfunctional politics. The column began with these words:

‘I’m sitting at my computer, watching part of Jamaica’s future burn. It’s been burning for four days so far, and despite the best efforts of the fire brigade, it will probably go on burning perhaps for weeks or even months.

‘Garbage dumps are temperamental things and if there is enough carbonaceous material underneath to supply the methane, a garbage dump can burn for years, just like an oil well, and for the same reasons.”

A few months after that occurred another of our serial panics about crime and violence – about which most of the journalistic pundits – myself included – wrote ad nauseam. This followed panics of 1974 (Suppression of Crimes Act & Gun Court) and 1968 (Shearer’s “No Beatitudes”) and as far back in history as we care to go we have these regular outbreaks of lawlessness, hooliganism, ‘rude bwoys”; and for each outbreak there are the same solutions proposed: armed militias, more firearms, military service for youth, indefinite detention and long, long, prison sentences.

This latest outbreak of bourgeoise hysteria was given a poignant twist in an article by that former terror of the bourgeoise, Professor Don Robotham, now turned gamekeeper and a severe critic of working class lawlessness.

Robotham explicitly supports a programme of indefinite detention to be used to deprive people of their liberty because someone suspects them of criminal behaviour. Delicately, he proposes a “a law - and human rights-governed detention system. This makes it fundamentally different from all previous approaches, barring none.”

According to Robotham:

“ The first thing to establish, therefore, is (sic) the precise standards of information which any detention order would have to meet. Would such an order have to rise to the current standards for an indictment, or would the standards be lower? How much lower, and in what respects? With the help of our experienced lawyers and human rights community we can define this quite stringently and reduce arbitrariness to a minimum.”

In such a system we will not try people on evidence; they will no longer to face their accusers in court, they will no longer be deemed innocent until proven guilty. Robotham wants to suborn the whole hierarchy of the human rights lobby into surrendering their rights and the rights of the poor and helpless in the grand and noble cause of defeating crime.

Robotham’s article, entitled “Nolle prosequi” argues that there is something seriously wrong in the system of justice because “…cases … collapsed because the witnesses had vanished without a trace, some, no doubt, sent to join their ancestors. All the painstaking investigative work of the police and the diligence of the prosecution came to naught. The Government had no choice but to advise the court that they could not proceed - nolle prosequi. The guns barked, the witnesses fled, the cases collapsed, end of story”.

There are lots of things wrong with this scenario. The main thing is that unlike almost any other police force in the world, the Jamaican police depend almost exclusively on eye-witness evidence. To talk about painstaking investigation is mostly a joke.

There are two problems with eye-witness evidence. One is that it is the most unreliable evidence; two is that there are not normally that many witnesses to a crime who hang around to be identified by the cops. Many policemen work by what I call approximation. ‘You were approximately here so you must be a witness and you were approximately there so you must be the gunman.’

The real problem is a problem of police intelligence.

It is my belief that the incidence of unsolved crime is correlated to the number of police cars imported over any five year period.

Beat duty has been abandoned and the police swoop down on ghetto communities like the American Special Forces in Vietnam. This is not an original observation. I first made it more than 40 years ago in Public Opinion.

When a policeman walks down a street on a regular beat he will talk randomly to all sorts of people who will tell him good morning or offer him a glass of water or drop a casual word in his ear. Nobody but he will know who told him what. Nobody is identifiable as an informer. As he goes through the community other bits of information will filter down to him, second hand, third hand and, sometimes, firsthand. As the community develops confidence in his presence that alone will ‘cool’ some of the least daring and will make the most reckless more careful, at least. But more than that, the unarmed beat duty policeman becomes a walking data base of useful information which he can eventually hand over to the investigators.

Unfortunately, we have abandoned this simple preventive device in favour of mechanised counter-terror.

That has never worked anywhere in the world

No criticism of the police

Robotham, like many of us, is afraid of police violence. He will never criticise the police force for its carelessness and ineptitude which may be far greater dangers than corruption. The police federation has been allowed by successive governments to become almost a law unto itself, the only trade union of which Jamaicans are afraid.

If we are going to begin a serious assault on crime we have to strengthen those in the federation who understand and practice good police work and get rid of the noisemakers whose purpose is simply to get by with as little work and study as possible. We are paying the police enough to be entitled to expect a much higher level of performance.

In my time, I have solved two murder cases leading to successful prosecutions. One was the Headless Corpse case about 1953. The police were following all sorts of false leads and had almost given up the case when I wrote two articles in the Star analysing, from the commonsense point of view, what had probably happened. The police had been looking for a foreign murderer, a doctor, they thought, and they were trying to identify the headless body by recourse to Interpol. The dead woman clearly must be a missing tourist.

I pointed out that the spot where the body was discovered (the Anchovy sea caves near Port Antonio) was unlikely to be known by anyone from outside the district, let alone a foreign visitor, and that far from surgical skill being needed to so cleanly sever the head, the murder’s skills probably lay in butchering and banana work. The woman, I guessed was probably of Indian descent. I was right on all counts. Several detectives told me that the case began to come together when the police decided, having nothing better to do, to follow my line of reasoning. They found the murderer, (a butcher and banana-man from Anchovy) identified the victim (his wife, an Indian) and with the forensic help of Professor Harper of the UWI, concluded a sensational case with a conviction.

In the second case the prosecution was hampered by the fact that the murderer was a policeman (Cons George Porter) and I was threatened with jail by the DPP (Huntley Monroe, father of Robotham’s former sidekick, Trevor) unless I could prove my allegations against Porter. I did, even though it meant an exhumation of the murdered man’s body.

Judicial killing or police execution is no answer to murder. They simply provoke more bloodletting. Depriving people of their liberty on suspicion is no answer to the failure of forensic investigation and human intelligence.

In Alcoholics Anonymous they say that doing the same thing over and over in the hope of achieving different results each time is one definition of lunacy.

The value of old men is that we can remind the successor generations of our mistakes and counsel them not to repeat them. We have already wasted so much – so much time, so much energy and treasure and above all, so much lost liberty and so many lives. That is lunacy.

Watching Ideas Burn

Every time we have a problem we are counseled to seek the short term solutions, the draconian laws, the restriction of Liberty in the interest, we are told, of Liberty. That is President Bush’s solution and the solution of every power seeking demagogue through history. Mussolini made the trains run on time, Lee Kwan Yew has not yet figured how to punish the involuntary discharge of anal wind but he has every other orifice covered. We too can lock down the society in the interest of the Gross Domestic Product.

What no one has ever figured out is how to make people accept enslavement. Robotham derides ‘holistic’ solutions, but he clearly hasn’t read a slew of documents from his own intellectual headquarters – the World Bank. After dozens of studies the World Bank has published several books which make it clear that structural change is the only answer to most of our problems – especially including CRIME.

The World Bank is not a Socialist organisation. It is in fact the Colonial Office of Globalised Capitalism. Yet, the Bank says that education, putting children in school and finding ways of keeping them there will not only reduce violence and crime significantly, but also boost the Gross Domestic Product by increments of from 2 percent to 9 percent.

Nothing we have done in our misconceived, unsustainable development has ever managed to produce such returns. We can raise the GDP by education, social welfare and small farm agriculture; programmes of soil conservation and reforestation. The problem: those would look too much like distributive politics, and the patron saints of the bourgeois, Carl Stone and Wilmot Perkins both denounce the unmitigated evil of such an approach.

The real problem with Jamaica? We can read but we don’t; and we can think but we prefer not to.

It really is as simple as that.

Meanwhile, thousands of children are being maimed at this moment by crime, by disease, by hunger and by the poisonous emissions from Riverton City.

Most of our movers and shakers have air-conditioned houses, air-conditioned SUVs, air-conditioned offices and air-conditioned minds. Riverton City Dump is not on their horizons. But take a look at the pictures taken three hours apart on Thursday morning. In the first one nearly a third of Kingston, including Port Bustamante and Norman Manley International Airport have disappeared.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: angry
Current Location: At home
Current Music: NPR

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.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Location: At home
Current Music: NPR

John Maxwell

If we are really seeking effective solutions to the problem of violent crime in Jamaica I can think of a few really compelling gimmicks which would, at least, satisfy the middle class demand for “Action” while being dangerously unsustainable environmentally. It would be satisfying at one blow, the two most important constituencies – those who read newspapers and those who read spreadsheets and comics..

A very long time ago, in a past century, a university scholar named Peter Philips led a symposium and edited a report on the causes of crime in society. The absence of antique booksellers in Jamaica makes it difficult for me to lay my hands on this ancient screed but oral tradition has it that the venerable author considered criminal violence to be one outgrowth of unjust societies.

Now, aeons later, another luminary, also named Peter Philips and perhaps a distant descendant, appears to believe that sequestering people for long periods of time will solve the “Crime Problem”.

In fact, long periods of sequestration would solve no end of problems. They could solve the population problem, if we simply locked up children in sex segregated institutions from the time they are ready to go to basic school and kept them there for say twenty years while they are subjected to ‘improving’ doctrines explaining to them how to be able to Just Say No to a variety of dangerous temptations. Such institutions would also solve the unemployment problem, requiring many more guards per inmate than a Spanish hotel requires per room. When the hotels become vacant we can indeed find appropriate uses for them, uses which will continue the noble tradition of destroying the environment and making life miserable for Jamaicans.

Cleared Up!

The Jamaica Constabulary ever so often, publishes reports of its accomplishments. In the old days the Commissioner presented a report to Parliament. For some reason during the sixties the government improved the crime statistics by not requiring the police to publish an annual report any more.

What we do know however, is that as time goes on and the vehicular and technological competence of the force is sharpened, its capacity to solve crimes drops. No longer can you discover how many crimes resulted in successful prosecutions; These days you are forced to make do with a statistic about how many crimes were ‘cleared up’.

This is a strange concept because it allows the police attribution of crimes to offenders who have never been charged with them. So-called ‘wanted men” who have been outshot in shoot-outs, are credited post mortem with all sorts of exploits; which of course means an improvement in the ‘cleared up’ rate.

But since even this crude solution yields a ‘success’ rate of less than one in three murders we can understand the reason for ‘crime waves’: people will commit crimes if they have a reasonable chance of avoiding detection and prosecution. In Jamaica they are twice as likely to get away with murder as they are to be detected, let alone prosecuted and found guilty. Just compare the number of murders with the number of murder trials

The inefficiency of the Jamaican police is a major factor in crime statistics.

In the late seventies for instance, the Gleaner carried an encouraging number of police claims to have cleared up a certain murder.

A taxi driver had been murdered in Gordon Town by a lone gunman, it was reported. Over the next six months or so, the police cleared up this crime no less than three and perhaps as many as four or five times. Shooting to death the lone gunman involved each time. No one was ever tried for the murder but several ‘“most wanted criminals” bit the dust no doubt significantly reducing the crime rate for the next two hours or so.

The press has for years demonstrated contempt for those people who put themselves in harm’s way trying to protect the interest of the oppressed. Jamaicans For Justice are an easy target for several reasons, among them the presence of so many light-skinned people in its leadership. The police and some fundamentalist parsons, ‘journalists’ and politicians have exploited this perceived loophole and try to label JFJ and people like me as contemptible accomplices or at least, enablers of criminals. In the early seventies, one policeman even suggested that I needed to be hanged from a gallows because of my objection to capital punishment.

The media continues its ignorant dismissal of human rights campaigners. My colleague and friend Morris Cargill thought for most of his life that police brutality was greatly exaggerated by people like me. That was until the headman on his banana estate was humiliated, brutalised and arrested by the police simply because the man was seeking information about his son’s death in a traffic accident.

Centuries of slavery have inured us to slavish behaviour as well as to the sadistic.

In Friday’s Gleaner the editorial makes the ridiculous presumption that the PNPs leader would have ‘vetted’ her deputy’s speech in Parliament and then goes on to suggest that the PNP is unclear on its position regarding civil liberties..

The Gleaner clearly expects that the Leader of the Opposition should ride herd on her members, whipping them into line like cattle. This is precisely the bahaviour that destroyed the JLP under Seaga and makes that party dysfunctional today.

The editorial then continues to snidely conflate the views of the PNPYO and “re-emergent” Jamaicans for Justice – as if they had been in hiding for some shameful reason.

The Gleaner and Dr Phillips seem to be of the same kidney as the US Republican party and the craven media after 9/11 when the White House and its agents managed to frighten many Americans into yielding up their liberties, their rights and parts of the Constitution for the illusion of safety from Bin Laden, guaranteed by George Bush.

In the Jamaican context the Gleaner and others make the mistake of confusing ‘preventive detention’ with extended detention before trial. This confusion is part of the panic now driving the society, in which words are much more important than actions and gimmicks are the currency of development and of policy. If we don’t understand what we propose to do we are crazier even than I thought.

Footnote: At the risk of further enraging the elite diaspora I say:

“No Representation without Taxation!”

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: Where I ought to be
Current Music: NPR

John Maxwell

Most of the world seems to realise that we are in a ‘perfect storm’ of crises but in Jamaica we seem to be oblivious to everything but “Crime & Violence”.

In the early 60s we were obsessed by what was then described as ‘ hooliganism’ then later by ‘rude boys’ followed by paranoid fantasies about Communism and, always, since 1974, by ‘garrisons’.

A garrison by most definitions is a constituency held for too long by the other party. Politicians, whether they know it or not are, according to the conventional wisdom, patrons of the garrison gangs. Its all about ‘politics’, except that most commentators. particularly the most clamant, don’t understand the politics of the Jamaican ghettos and have no idea what happens in them

One thing will shortly become clear; hunger, frustration and economic injustice are the most effective recruiters for gangsters, for “Crime & Violence”. As I said last week, quoting Fidel Castro, ‘bullets can kill the poor and the hungry but bullets cannot kill poverty and hunger”.

In the next few weeks and months we will need to confront several urgent crises:

• Unaffordable prices for imported food

• Shortages of food, hoarding and the need for rationing

• Unaffordable costs imported fuel

• Disastrous decline in remittances

• Big drop in Tourism receipts

• Big fall off in bauxite exports

• Probable collapse in export earnings for bananas and sugar because of drought and storm

• Increasing Unemployment

• Massively burgeoning Triangular trade in drugs and firearms;

For a start

The first thing we need to recognise is that most people are good and kind and reasonable and simply need to know that their humanity is respected and important.

All the adverse conditions above will mean a serious shortfall in government revenue. Even if there were no shortfall, the government would still need massive additional funds to deal with the nine crises listed above.

For instance, it is already clear that the Millennium Highway is on the point of financial collapse. We don’t need accountants to reveal this; a drive on the highway will demonstrate that the road is being avoided by its targeted consumers.

The fall-off in remittances will be most serious because remittances fuel the bottom levels of the society. Money – masses of it – will be urgently needed for social support. People are not going to quietly accept involuntary starvation.

Cruise shipping, will be seriously hit and those few who profit from it will be laying off employees. The doubling of fuel costs will also devastate air travel and the hotels, adding to the misery, as will concomitant layoffs in entertainment, transport and ancillary services. We need to cancel new cruise shipping piers and similar instant white elephants such as new superhotels and casinos.

All tax collections will nosedive especially in service industries.

Money

The government will be forced to realise that there is only one way to find the billions of dollars it will need to stave off social dissolution. That money will only be available from our own resources, by withholding perhaps half of our scheduled debt payments. It will be Hobson’s choice: either not pay the creditors or watch the society go up in flames. We can’t borrow our way out of these emergencies

Power

We will need to subsidise public transport, cooking gas and kerosene or else watch the entire forest cover disappear, followed by the hillside and mountain topsoil.We need to begin restoring and extending the railway

We will need to divert as much investment as possible to the exploration, planning and construction of solar (photovoltaic) and wind turbine power generation and ban all further investment in fossil fuelled power generation --an expensive dead end street.

Food

We need to start NOW distributing seeds and slips -- peas, beans, corn, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, sweet peppers, carrots, coco, tannia, dasheen, yampi, etc and other easily grown backyard crops with high nutritional value.We will need to persuade large landowners, in their own survival interest, to disgorge some of the enormous acreages which they don’t use and don’t need. Right off the bat the government needs to ban all conversion of farmland into non-farm uses and, as the British did in the Second World War, require all landowners to devote at least ten percent of their land to food production. This will guarantee more food, increased employment and reduced praedial larceny.

We will need to convince shops and supermarkets to restrain their profit taking and to be willing to buy from small suppliers. We will need to establish a new food marketing agency.

Water

We need to realise that we can no longer pretend to be able to afford to squander water for irrigating sugar or for processing bauxite, the demand for food must take precedence. We need to take back into public ownership the public water supplies recently sold to private traders. We need to recognise the fact that our water is precious, that really WATER IS LIFE, as the NWC slogan has it, and must be under social control.

We need to repair and build new parish tanks and help householders to build or buy their own domestic water storage.

Political cooperation

We need to convince the Americans to put real muscle into halting their sacred firearms export trade.

As I predicted just after the general elections last year, the JLP was likely to lose its parliamentary majority within a few months and I suggested that the PNP should move extremely carefully in asserting its options. I suggested then and I repeat the suggestion that Bruce Golding and Portia Simpson Miller should get together quickly to arrange how to assign management systems for all the crises we face. We need to involve the entire society at every level to ensure our survival. The public interest demands responsible government and community participation in decision making.

If we didn’t know it before, we are now at the time when our development must be sustainable in the protection of everything we value and all of the people of this once and future blessed isle. We need to understand the need to begin eradicating poverty and developing a survival Agenda – fifteen years late – for the 21st century. Even so, better late than total catastrophe.

The time for serious national and community planning and action is NOW. If we manage to do what we need to do, I am prepared to bet that our crime problem will rapidly begin to subside.

If we don’t do what we need to do I suppose we will need to anticipate a renewed and expanded civil war, starvation and mass misery and emigration.

Not only can we make Jamaica work – We are at the point where we have no choice.

jankunnu@gmail.com

Current Mood: contemplative

Mango Walk

Verse, Prose, And All That's In Between

Jamaica for sale

The USA -- Free at Last?

The road away from Serfdom

Racism and Poverty

Count no Chickens

Singer-Man

The Treachery of the Stewards

The Rich and the Wretched

Children of Prometheus

Great White Snark

'There's a Natural Mystic...'

Let them eat Croissants!

If only the truth were known...

Shanty-town Law

Karl Rove, Cartoonist

(no subject)

Going round in circles

None dare call it Genocide

The role of the gimmick in governance

Trouble don' set like rain

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March 2015

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