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Drive-by 'Development'
John Maxwell
About forty years ago when I lived in London and worked for the BBC, I strolled one day into the Victoria & Albert
Museum to view an exhibition of the arts of 'Primitive' and indigenous cultures of the world. I was brought up
short at the very entrance to the museum by the sight of a small figure I had last seen at the museum of the Institute of
Jamaica. It was a small, black carving of a human figure with a bird's head – one arm uplifted and the other outstretched,
resembling the attitude of a policeman directing traffic.
It was a zemi – an Arawak (as we called the Tainos then) representation of a demi-human demigod or ancestral
spirit. Going into the museum I discovered that the zemi at the door was the original of the carving in Jamaica, and what
I thought was the original Jamaican zemi on East Street was the copy.
The V&A is part of the British Museum and the British museum was founded by the bequests of Sir Hans Sloane, who
was personal physician to the Governor of Jamaica, the Duke of Manchester. Sloane spent his time in Jamaica collecting all
manner of curiosities, including natural history specimens.
He did not however, collect the zemi; that was stolen later.
As Lord Mahon's history of England put it, "the museum has ever since continued to thrive and grow, sometimes by accessions
liable to censure, as by the Elgin spoils of Athens …" – a notorious example of the Imperial looting of
foreign cultures for the greater glory of Britain. This imperial pillage was not confined to Britain. Museums in the United
States, Germany, Austria, France, Spain and the Netherlands, among others contain some of the finest collections of stolen
national treasures from other nations.
A few years ago the Italians were forced to return to Ethiopia the sacred obelisk of Axum (1700 years old, 180 feet high
and weighing more than 150 tons) and testimony to the greatness that was Ethiopia's before the Europeans turned their attentions
to conquest, genocide and slavery.
The looting of artifacts of ancient civilizations continues, the most recent and spectacular being the rape of Iraq's
8,000 years of history and culture by armies of looters directed by rich men in the western world – 'eminent collectors'
who, if not so rich, would be described as criminal – receivers of stolen property. It was all done under the benevolent
gaze of Field Marshal Donald von Rumsfeld, then the self-appointed Caliph of Baghdad. "Stuff happens,” he said.
Here in Jamaica we have been avid participants in what may be described as consensual rape, in which ignoramuses posing
as public servants have been giving away or selling priceless patrimony to all sorts of freebooters.
Long Mountain, for
instance, is not only a priceless hotspot of biodiversity – the site of one plant (albiflora portlandia) known
nowhere else in the world – but also the site of several Taino – and possibly much older – pre-Columbian
settlements. Mr. Patterson handed much of this treasure over to Mr. Robert Cartade for the construction of a gated community
on state-owned land. No one knows how much the deal was worth. All we know is that we have lost forever, records of civilizations
which may have been superior to ours at least in their respect for human dignity.
It may be useful to remember that Schliemann excavated six levels of ancient Troy, one under the other. Right
now, further depredations are afoot. Falmouth, that gorgeous if neglected Georgian masterpiece, is about to be Botoxed and
cosmetically altered in the interest of the cruise shipping industry and its attendant gimmick 'attractions' while various
unsavory bean counters hold options to destroy the Cockpit Country and to sequester the entire Trelawny coast from public
access.
One part of this storied coast, Stewart Castle at Carey Park near Duncans, is an archaeological and biological treasure
which is even now being explored by people from the University of Kentucky who have found artifacts of slavery, both of the
masters and the slaves, and of the Tainos, about all of which we remain totally ignorant.
That may not be as bad as it sounds, because they may find objects of interest which would otherwise have been covered
by one of three (count 'em – three!) golf-courses together with housing for foreign elites which are due to be approved
in the interest of drive-by 'development'. The golf courses will use almost as much water daily as all the people of Kingston.
These developments may finally bring to a head the resource conflict between tourism and its host country. The people
living just outside these developments depend on a water supply for which my father and others agitated eighty years ago but
is now inadequate for the native population. Even Silver Sands and Duncans itself, have serious water problems because the
Dornoch water supply from the Rio Bueno, is just not sufficient.
In a lunatic example of the boobocracy's not knowing its right hand from its left, the Patterson government was proposing
to let loose the bauxite companies on the Cockpit Country, destroying not only one of the world's most precious biological
hotspots, but also the limestone aquifers supplying the water for most of the county of Cornwall.
At the same time it was inaugurating the unfortunately named Leakey water supply, a development meant to provide carrying
capacity for hotels, casinos and condominiums on the arid seacoast and beautiful beaches of Trelawny.
What our boobocrats do not understand is that JAMAICA IS THE ATTRACTION. We don't need to import camels or design
other idiot 'attractions'. Do we really need to import foreigners to sell in-bond goods imported from abroad to classy
dudes imported from abroad to splash their money around in Prada and Gucci shops and casinos which are washing machines for
money before it is re-exported to its natural habitats in Liechtenstein, Cayman and other places where the hearts of our elites
are resident.
Soon, Jamaica will resemble the Palestine West Bank, a collection of Bantustans of penury embedded in an ever expanding
matrix of 'development' for which we will supply the manpower for domestic service, sanitation and security, armies of the
low paid cut off from real development by the imperatives of the 'Bell Curve"
Irrelevant Patrimony
I was fortunate enough to be on visits to Amsterdam in 2002 and 2004 when by pure coincidence each time there happened
to be a major exhibition of ancient culture, the first from Egypt, the second from Mexico. These countries are foremost among
those which have seized control of their archaeological patrimony in the national interest, both cultural and financial. Even
so, some of the most important exhibits came from museums outside the host countries. In Mexico there dwelt nearly two thousand
years ago a people known to us as Olmecs.
The Olmecs invented the essential mathematical concept of the zero, a few hundred years before Ptolemy in Egypt. The
Olmecs, if their statuary is any guide, looked remarkably African. Ethnologists don't want to believe that these guys were
African because they refuse to believe that Africans could have been so advanced and that they made it to the western hemisphere
before Europeans. They must have come from Asia!!! Like the Maori, perhaps.
So Asians sat down and carved portrait sculptures of people they had never seen and made them 2 to 3 meters high and
weighing six to twenty tons each. And they got their sculptural rock from fifty miles or more away from where they put them
up. Talk about Vision! In the Egyptian exhibition, I remember particularly the statue of an Egyptian queen, which I,
and many others more expert than I, consider to be one of the most beautiful man made objects in the world. It also seemed
fairly clear that most of the Pharaohs must have been ethnically African and that despite all the ethnographers to the contrary;
the Egyptian civilization was home grown in Africa and not imported from anywhere else.
For Egypt and Mexico, history and archaeology are potent attractions, pulling in millions of visitors. Here in Jamaica
we build roads over sites believed to be Taino, although we don't know if they may be even more ancient. Between Moneague
in St Ann and Point Hill in St Catherine at a place called Union Hill, there is what appears to be a pyramid of stone which
some people say is an idiosyncratically designed coffee barbecue. Of course it can't be a pyramid! Jamaica has no prehistory
worth considering!
So although we don't know whether Union Hill really is an Olmec pyramid as I think, we may soon allow the bauxite companies
to level it in the interest of foreign exchange, as they have been unleashed to savage and maim the landscape surrounding
the birthplace of Norman Manley at Roxburgh in Manchester.
If, as I suspect, Jamaica is much more archaeologically and (palaeontologically) interesting than most people suspect,
we may, in the most fundamental and shameful sense, be swapping our patrimony for a putrid mess of pottage. COPYRIGHT©2008
John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com
Billionaire Bangarang
John Maxwell
There are basically two kinds of people in the world: those with too little money and those with too much.
Those with too much between them control nearly half the world’s wealth, could;d fit comfortably in two or three jumbo
jets. According to Forbes magazine, the global stock oF billionaires increased from 793 in 2006 to 946 in 2007 –
a comfortable audience for the Ward Theatre.
According to figures from the United Nations University/WIDER, the richest 1% of the world’s population
— about 37 million people own 40% or nearly half of the world’s people, while the bottom half
— nearly two billion people, together own just about one percent of the world’s assets. In these computations,
wealth does not include houses, however grand, nor transportation Rolls Royces or personal jets.
The world — or at least some parts of it is in the throes of a billionaire problem; A Wall Street
journal columnist reported last October on a visit to the super rich ski resort of Aspen Colorado and says he was struck by
the number of rich people in town and by the number of locals who complained about the number of rich people in town. Since
our new tourism thrust is premised on the attraction of the super rich I decided to do little research into possible
problems.
The rich do have one nasty habit: they keep on getting richer while the rest of us get poorer. In Aspen
that causes problems. Natives can’t afford houses in their own town anymore. The price for a single family unit begins
at US$ 5 million (about J$ 350 million) Not even doctors can afford to buy houses in Aspen any more. People are worried
that there are too many Prada and Gucci stores in town and I would hate to imagine the price of a bottle of Perrier water
or a Blue Mountain coffee.
I can just imagine it. I am the guest of some billionaire in Aspen and the party is on her. So, to impress
her a little bit I take her to the nearest Starbucks (or the billionaire equivalent) an order two coffees. I then discover
that I have to pawn my plane ticket to pay for them. The rich grow richer effortlessly, but some of them, of course, like
to grease the skids even though they know the lolly is coming down in floods anyway As we have seen in the united States,
the middle class of that country, particularly the black middle class is undergoing a painful process of wealth extraction,
taken to the cleaners by mortgage brokers and their outlaw in-laws in the derivatives business.
This has created a small problem, because though billions have been sucked out of the middle-class, some
of it has almost literally vaporised into the high altitude world of sophisticated financial products, or derivatives, in
which sub-prime mortgages were valued by eminent bankers as better than sovereign bonds issued by Jamaica or Venezuela or
even the US itself. ‘Wealth creation’ depends eventually on the players finding a great number of
what they call ‘Greater Fools’ willing to come in at the zany end of the market.
The theory is that if millions of naive punters lose their shirts the loss will be spread over wide areas
and no one will take too much notice. But the ‘wealth creation’ game depends on a high velocity of circulation,
with each hand retaining a smidgen of the gold dust that attaches to the securities which zip through the system like pork
fat through a goose. Wealth cannot be created or destroyed. I have no intention of going into the theory of surplus value
but you can take it from me that there is sweat is the real currency of the world and the source of all wealth. The transmutation
of sweat into money and profit is what makes the world go round, but while the Earth may appear to be a perpetual motion machine
there is no human system which can duplicate its effects for more than a moment.
So while wealth is extracted from middle class Americans and workers all over the world, eventually, classical
economics and common sense all tell you that sales and profits depend on markets and markets depend on people and people depend
on earnings and the whole structure collapses when the working class is gutted, as is happening at this moment. Greed is the
frictional element. If capitalists could be satisfied with ‘rational’ profits, all would be well. But they are
not. Which is why the take home pay of the American workers has stagnated at 1973 levels and the wealth of his masters has
expanded exponentially meanwhile.?
As Professor James Petras points out in an article (www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=PET20070323&articleId=5159) published last year, the rise of the billionaires was accompanied by serious social problems. Mass uprisings
became commpnplace in India and China. “In India, which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total
wealth of $191 billion, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to 'India's security' were the Maoist-led
guerrilla armies and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country.
In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion net worth, the new rulers, confronting nearly a hundred
thousand reported riots and protests, have increased the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundred fold, and increased
spending for the rural poor by $10 billion in the hopes of lessening the monstrous class inequalities and heading off a mass
upheaval.” IT may surprise you to discover that in the United States, one in every 100 adult Americans is in jail.
That amazing statistic includes one in every nine black men between 20 and 34 and one in every hundred adult black women behind
bars. Mind boggling.
Disparity in Growth
Petras said the total wealth of this global ruling class grew 35% per year
while income levels for the lower 55% of the world’s people declined or stagnated. While General motors and Ford lay
off thousands of workers the Federal Trade Commission is besieged by reports of millions of toxic toys from China flooding
the market and Lou Dobbs on CNN is pathetically demanding action against Mexican and other illegal immigrants and some drastic
surgery perhaps, on NAFTA.
Petras also deals with the “the newest, youngest and fastest-growing group of billionaires, the Russian
oligarchy stands out for its most rapacious beginnings. Over two-thirds (67 per cent) of the current Russian billionaire oligarchs
began their concentration of wealth in their mid to early twenties. During the infamous decade of the 1990s under the quasi-dictatorial
rule of Boris Yeltsin and his US-directed economic advisers, Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar the entire Russian economy was
put up for sale for a 'political price', which was far below its real value. Without exception, the transfers of property
were achieved through gangster tactics assassinations, massive theft, and seizure of state resources, illicit stock
manipulation and buyouts. The future billionaires stripped the Russian state of over a trillion dollars worth of factories,
transport, oil, gas, iron, coal and other formerly state-owned resources.” Globalisation, it is clear, does work for
some.
The Obama Charisma
The fact that it doesn’t work for most of us is one of the factors behind the
steamroller effect of Barrack Obama’s charismatic appeal. People see in him an answer to their frustrations with a government
that does not seem connected to their concerns, their lives and their welfare. The press, bless their hearts, are in a state
of total confusion, incessantly parsing language and producing every day some new piece of intelligence which
would a few years ago, have had the American electorate in a flutter.
The problem is that the electorate is paying almost no attention to the conventional media or to their delegates
in politics, the John McCains and the Bill Clintons. An almost unnoticed development last week suggests that the American
political system, like the economic structure, is in for a seismic shock. In the rock-ribbed Yankee Republican region
of Upstate New York, in a seat held by Republicans for a century, a Democrat beat the wealthy Republican candidate in a special
election. It was a seat with nearly 80,000 registered Republicans nearly twice as many as the 47,000 Democrats. The New York
State senate has been controlled by Republicans for all but two years since 1939.
The prospect of Obama is scaring the Republicans silly. The one thing preventing an unprecedented flood
of money for John McCain is that when his campaign seemed all but dead some six months ago, he entered into a deal with the
Federal Elections Commission for public financing. Now that the Obama heat is on and billionaires are waiting in line to give
him money, he wants to get out of the arrangement, but the FEC can’t even vote on his request because it has no quorum.
The result is that the real Republican campaign will be effectively financed from outside McCain’s
purview by the kind of people who financed the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry in the last election. That means that
this election campaign, despite the civility and sophistication of Barack Obama and Mr McCain’s pious burblings, is
going to be by far the dirtiest in the history of the United States. You read it here first.
Criminal Libel and Hate mongering
The campaign to loosen our libel laws does not have my complete
sympathy, which might seem odd for a journalist who has been sued unsuccessfully or threatened with more writs than any other
in Jamaica. The problem is not really with the Defamation Act which has been broadly expanded by case law judgments in which
the concept of privilege has been expanded and responsible journalists are given some real protection. The problem is with
the procedure, which allows vexatious complainants to issue writs which have no chance of success in the hope that the writs
will intimidate the publishers and perhaps the journalists.
But there is another point. People want to abolish the offence of criminal libel, which mainly consists
of imputing criminal conduct or behaviour to someone. People are up in arms against criminal libel because some halfwits in
the Southern Caribbean are using it to attack journalists. That clearly should be made impossible. But criminal libel is also
the only defence we have against hate speech, and in Jamaica the homophobes and xenophobes are having a field day inciting
violence against homosexuals and Haitians. The reason is quite simple: hate sells newspapers. The criminal libel law is meant
to deal with statements that are likely to lead to serious breaches of the peace, and if inciting people to murder homosexuals
or anyone else is not such a piece of obnoxious wickedness
I don’t know what is. I believe that the ‘incitement’ section of the criminal libel law
should be left intact, because I believe that certain newspaper editors should be forced to explain and answer for their
outrageous and uncivilised behaviour. They should not be allowed to profit from it. Copyright © 2008 John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com
The NEPA/NRCA Poppyshow John Maxwell
The National Environment and Planning Agency says I am telling lies about them. On their website this week, their ‘Top
Story’ declares rather grandly: "NEPA clarifies issues arising from comments made in John Maxwell’s column of
February 17 " Unfortunately the ‘clarification’ doesn’t clarify anything. Instead it alleges I made a statement
which I did not. It also obfuscates the real issues. According to NEPA: "The writer reported in the column that no representative
from NEPA was present at a public consultation held in Runaway Bay on Monday, February 11, 2008, to present the findings of
an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). The statement is incorrect; in fact, representatives from both NEPA and the Ministry
of Health and Environment were present. During the consultation questions were posed to which the Agency responded, leaving
it hard to believe that in the final analysis, we were thought to be absent." What I wrote was quite different.
"There was an apology for absence from NEPA/NRCA which was perhaps understandable .…" At least one person present
at the meeting has written NEPA to contradict their version. She wrote "… the VERBATIM report of the meeting …
should substantiate the FACT that apologies for absence of NRCA and NEPA were received at the beginning of the meeting …"
She then pointed out that the NEPA rep arrived late. It seems to me that the NEPA/NRCA has a duty to be officially in charge
and present at any public presentation of an EIA. It is, after all their responsibility. They have a duty to guide and instruct.
They can’t do this when they come late and sit at the back of the hall.
NEPA then tries to make me look foolish in the following words: "With due regard to the writer’s vast experience,
we are somewhat surprised by the suggestion that EIA’s determine whether projects are necessary. In fact, we wish to
clarify that the necessity of developments is not a consideration, rather EIA studies are primarily intended to provide a
comprehensive evaluation of the proposed development, in terms of predicted environmental impacts, needed mitigation strategies,
socio-economic factors, potentially viable alternatives and all related legislations. (sic) The public consultation process
facilitates the collection and inclusion of comments and concerns of citizens, which are then included in the final EIA. "
The problem is that with these words NEPA demonstrates its incompetence. In ‘Guidelines for the presentation of an EIA’,
(on the NEPA website) in a section entitled ‘Contextual framework’ it is clear that NEPA has the duty to decide
whether projects are necessary or desirable. Under the heading ‘What is the EIA?’ the agency’s guidelines
say inter alia that: "The term [EIA] describes a technique and a process by which information about the interaction between
a proposed development project and the environment is collected, analysed, and interpreted to produce a report on potential
impacts and to provide the basis for sound decision-making. The results of the study are taken into account by the Regulatory
Authority in the determination of whether the proposed development should be allowed, and under what conditions." (My italics)
If that does not imply a decision on whether a project is necessary it is clear that I don’t understand the English
language. If an authority can decide whether a project should be allowed, doesn’t that mean that it may decide whether
the project is necessary? It is my opinion that NEPA/NRCA as presently constituted under the Acts which govern them, constitute
s serious threat to the Jamaican environment.
When I was Chairman of the old NRCA (which the new NRCA denies ever existed) environmental assessments were unknown to
most people. Some of us, however were aware and in our 1977 Action Plan for Kingston Harbour we asked the government to make
such assessments mandatory. Thirty years later, EIAs have become mandatory in most jurisdictions. EIAs have several functions,
the first being the protection of the environmental (including ecological) integrity of our planet. The environment includes
not only the ecology - the natural systems, or biology - but also and crucially, the human environment. Anyone who has the
slightest acquaintance with Agenda 21 should be aware that ‘development’ is Human development and that environmental
integrity necessarily includes the welfare of the community as a whole. NEPA and the Jamaican ‘developers’ prefer
to behave as if the only people who need to know about a proposed new development are those in direct contact with it. Mr
Patterson’s government produced a "Strategic EIA" of several hundred pages for the Doomsday Highway and ‘discussed’
it at a so-called public meeting in an obscure restaurant in Spanish Town. This was in relation to a road which has the capacity
not only to change the very landscape of Jamaica but to cause dangerous financial damage and serious dislocation to the lives
of everyone living anywhere near the road - as I pointed out before work began on this monstrosity.
As designed, the Doomsday Highway will devastate an area half the size of the parish of Hanover. In the case of our Brave
New Hotels, the developers and the NEPA/NRCA think it necessary to inform only those living in intimate proximity to the development.
So theme parks with imported camels - carriers of trypanosomes - don’t seem to need EIAs regardless of the danger to
our local goat industry. Bauxite mining, similarly, gets a free pass. Assaults on our very limited beaches are not considered
to be the business of all Jamaicans, although three million or more of us including those living abroad, had access to less
than 20 miles of public beach 30 years ago and have even less today. If we divide the (1980) mileage of beaches by our local
population the market represents 135,000 resident Jamaicans for every mile of beach. Yet there are people who want desperately
to take away what little we have and to sequester it behind high walls, big dogs and men with guns.
The UDC’s destruction of Negril’s beaches by sewerage and illegal groynes is complemented by the destruction
of Negril’s reefs by fertiliser from sugar plantations. The destruction of the one of world’s best studied and
most famous reefs, between Ocho Rios and Rio Bueno is not judged by the developers or NEPA to be worth public notice. When
I showed a Bahia Principe representative, Mr Bailey Hay, my photographs of a sea of human excrement beside his hotel at Pear
Tree Bottom he said, airily, ‘Yes, we know about that." I was too stunned to say anything. Environmentalists have been
to court to try to compel the NRCA/NEPA to fulfil their responsibilities. It now seems we shall have to take the matter further.
The guidelines for EIAs and the NRCA/NEPA’s interpretation of them makes the process nothing more than an attractive
nuisance. There is no recognition that people must be at the centre of the development process. The paradigm is the Arhus
(or Aarhus) Convention, adopted a decade ago by the countries of the European Union and which guides the developmental activities
of European interests such as the Spanish hotel developers. Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations said
of the Convention
"Although regional in scope, the significance of the Arhus Convention is global. It is by far the most impressive elaboration
of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, which stresses the need for citizen's participation in environmental issues and for
access to information on the environment held by public authorities." "As such it is the most ambitious venture in the area
of environmental democracy so far undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations." Mr Annan’s view apparently had
no impact on the thinking of his good friend P.J Patterson whose government facilitated the degeneration of the NRCA/NEPA
into a toothless paper tiger. A Caribbean interpretation Principle 10 - the SPAW Protocol, is a dead letter as far as our
governments are concerned. A problem which will soon confront us is hidden in our new Economic Partnership Agreements with
the European Union and, in the growing consumer movement toward environmental responsibility. We are in serious danger of
building expensive new developments which would be illegal in Europe and will increasingly be shunned by more environmentally
aware tourists. Such people are having a severe effect on Spanish tourism and on the tourist industries of the overbuilt and
polluted Mediterranean and Dalmatian coasts. These unsustainable developments will quickly become a charge against both our
environmental credibility and our economic stability. When I said that about the Doomsday Highway there were sniggers. ‘The
man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ We shall see. Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com
The biggest jailbreak in history
John Maxwell
On Tuesday, January 29, it will be exactly six months since I established a folder on my computer titled
“The Crash of 2007”.
Tuesday January 29 will also be the 56th anniversary of my entry into what I thought
was the honourable profession of journalism. These days many journalists ask themselves whether what they practice is
a profession; whether what they do is honourable and even whether it constitutes journalism.
As disaster approaches we wonder why the global media don’t seem to notice.
As
the so-called Thatcherite-Reaganite revolution cartwheels its ungainly, calamitous and soul-destroying progress
towards implosion and self-destruction, many of us are too mesmerised by the gargantuan awfulness of it all to look at anything
but the accompanying economic and financial mayhem.
But there is lots more not so obvious.
In Iraq at this moment, the major evidence of humanity’s
eight millennia of civilisation is being looted and sold off to ‘investors’ who have more faith in the artefacts
of Nebuchednezzar’s peasants than in all the oil wells of George Bush. As well they might. As we sang in the late
sixties: “Everything Crash !”.
As Field Marshal (ret’d) Rumsfeld will tell you again, “Stuff happens!”
Move on! Get over it!
What is happening is so enormous, so transcendental that we can no more see it than we can see the rotation
of the Earth.
But there are many people, neither prophets nor even experts, who for a long time have been feeling in their
bones that something untoward is underway, rather as they say cats and dogs can sense seismic disturbances before earthquakes
shake us up and destroy our cosy domesticity and, often our lives. Even people like me, who thought they were feeling
the precursor tremors, are probably just as scared and apprehensive as anyone else. Worse yet, while we can vividly imagine
what may happen, most people don’t get really frightened until their own houses start to to do the tango.
I’ve been watching for a long time as the invisible hand of capitalism attempted even more daring
feats of prestidigitation; as the managers seized control from the shareholders and the corporate system abandoned any
idea of public responsibility or accountability, as jobs and the people in them, were ruthlessly discarded and production
was outsourced to slave societies – oops- ‘more cost effective countries’ – and the American capitalist
forgot what the trade unions had been trying to tell them before they were emasculated: The money paid to American workers
is what fuels American production. But the Enrons and the Exxons have never been interested. The idea was to make as much
money as possible as fast as possible and to hell with the workers.
A declining workforce still being paid at the equivalent of 1975 wages could obviously not support
the enormous superstructure of speculation, competitive consumption, greed and waste into which American capitalism
has transformed itself. If the workers couldn’t afford to support the economy out of their wages or savings, their masters
could always borrow European or Japanese or Chinese money to lend the workers and allow them to borrow more, paying
ever higher rates of interest, running faster on the treadmill and losing ground, and the whole elaborate Ponzi scheme would
go on and on until the second coming of Ayn Rand.
Multi billionaires like George Soros who spoke of ‘gangster capitalism’ and Warren Buffet, who
spoke of the unfairness of the system were ignored: perhaps they were just envious of how fast the new Lords of the Earth
could make money and didn’t really understand modern capitalism
What American capitalism has accomplished would have confounded Adam Smith and astonished even Karl
Marx: it destroyed its own working class.
For the new-rich, capitalism was a no-risk game where governments had a duty
to come to the rescue of those involved in unfortunate accidents, like Enron or the sub-prime mortgage debacle. Mr Alan Greenspan
who keeps Ayn Rand at his bedside, had always delivered when necessary, despite a schoolmasterish tendency to vaguely
deplore the ‘animal spirits’ and other juvenile delinquencies of his billionaire charges.
The problem of course, was that there were too many balls in the air and little or no certitude about how
many capitalists could dance on the head of a peon. Ayn Rand, from beyond the grave, advised self-love and selfishness as
the only virtues..
Margaret Thatcher did say ‘There is no such thing as Society” – expressing the Rand philosophy
even more succinctly than Miss Rand herself. This pithy aphorism was then swallowed by various dummies all over the world.
In the United States the explicit application of that principle has wiped out a significant proportion of the savings accumulated
by African Americans over the last 50 years or so. And though it is blacks who are most critically affected, whites, Hispanics,
and what is left of the working class are all condemned to fulfil the bizarre prediction in the gospel according to Matthew:
“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not,
from him shall be taken away even that he hath”. I’ve always considered that verse to perfectly represent capitalism.
The legacy of the Thatcherite-Reaganite counter revolution is not simply economic and social catastrophe
but structural unsustainability in every dimension
Though the Reagan/Thatchers did not believe in society their
commonplace lunacies such as the deregulation of aviation and Reagan's firing air traffic controllers – worked
because of human altruism and the self-sacrifice of the victimised. They privatisated essential services
– disregarding the fact that they would be run by the same people.
According to them these people would suddenly become more efficient, since there was a profit involved.
They ignored the probability of corruption, corner cutting, destruction of social cap[ital and decreases in the indices of
civilised existence.
Thatcher and Reagan were not the causes of global warming or of any of the dire curses that attend
us; they simply made it much harder for us to act quickly effectively and responsibly. The practical, pragmatic guys
who ‘make things happen’ too often produce developments that depend on destroying the environment.
maximising their profits and stealing environmental goods from the rest of us.
We’ve lost the 21 square miles of Kingston Harbour to sewage, solid waste, to assorted manufacturers
and to the Port Authority
Do you hear any of them offering to replace what they have stolen?
Of course, when the beach sand goes
and when the jellyfish swarm the beaches stinging and scaring our visitors, guess who will be asked to find the money to fix
the problems?
The biggest jailbreak in history
Ayn Rand would have approved of Israel’s latest initiative in Gaza. To punish the unruly Palestinians,
Israel with the approval of the West, imposed a blockade which quickly shut down municipal services, food supplies and emergency
rooms. As someone (not Margaret Thatcher) once said “The prospect of being hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully”
but what if the mind belongs to babies on a respirator who will die when the last generator runs of of fuel?
If Mugabe or Milosevich had done what the Israelis have done (and not for the first time) there would
have been outraged howls from the State Department and other chancelleries of the civilised world, condemning barbaric, primitive
inhuman behaviour. What happens to Palestinians or Haitians is not the concern of the cognitive elite of the world.
Haitians and Palestinians live in law-free zones where human rights should not interfere with effective governance.
And Condoleezza Rice, George Bush and the governments of the North Atlantic community approve of Israel’s turning Gaza
into a concentration camp. Their motive: to convince the Palestinians that they were wrong to choose as their government
the Hamas party. The Fatah party, once led by Yasser Arafat, was judged wanting by the Palestinians who voted for the much
more radical Hamas. Fatah, once into hijacking planes and reviled as a terrorist organisation, became the darling of the West
after the death of Arafat
Hamas and Israel share the same basic prejudices. Hamas refuses to recognise Israel’s statehood;
Israel refuses to recognise Palestinians right to their own country. Normally the Hamas opposition is expressed as if it meant
the extermination of the Israelis. The last Intifada was sparked by Israeli retaliation for the assassination of an Israeli
cabinet minister who advocated exterminating the Palestinians or at the minimum, expelling them from Palestine.
The Europeans, atoning for Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews, have consistently backed the Israeli
contention that the Jews of the world deserve a homeland and that homeland should be the territory of Palestine (land of the
Philistines/Falastin).
For the last 70 years, those Palestinians not expelled by Israel have lived in smaller and smaller
reservations in their own homeland with Israel continuing to install ‘facts on the ground’ – Israeli
owned housing scheme on Palestinian owned land.
A map of Palestine (if the western media would print one) would show Palestine
looking rather like a chocolate chip cookie, with Israeli settlements represented by the chocolate chips. Palestine is essentially
split into two non-viable tribal reservations, the West Bank (of the Jordan River) including Jerusalem and a slim
sliver of land on the
Mediterranean – the Gaza Strip.
Unlike the Haitians, the Palestinians are recognised by the United
Nations as refugees in their own land and have been so since 1948. Hamas two years ago won the electoral loyalty of
the majority of Palestinians. Israel and her western allies decided that democracy was fine for Gaza, but, that, as
in Haiti, you can vote for anyone you choose as long as it’s our surrogate – the Henry Ford principle.
The
Israelis try to control the Palestinians by a variety of means, incursions by the Israeli army in which Palestinians including
children, women and other innocents are ‘unfortunately’ killed; and by other means such as pre-dawn runs
by Israeli aircraft generating sonic booms which terrify children and drive adults crazy.
The Gazans retaliate by firing primitive rockets into Israeli settlements (built on Palestinian land) and
by suicide bomb attacks – although, mercifully, there haven’t been any for some time.
The situation is dangerous, crazy and unjust for everybody. The latest clampdown on Gaza was forcing
people into starvation, putting children and sick people at dangerous risk and imposing generally inhuman punishment on the
entire population for the sins of the rocket launching radicals. The Gazans were penned into this prison by an
Israeli- built analogue of the Berlin Wall, a 26 ft./8 meter high concrete and steel barrier.
The Hamas government
of Gaza last week decided to create its own facts, in the words of one of its leaders. Its sappers and heavy equipment
drivers knocked down the massive wall and nearly half a million Gazans streamed out into Egypt on the first day. For
some it was their first time out of the Gaza prison/concentration camp in their entire lives
The difference in perceptions is vast. TIME, Newsweek, CNN and other US media treated the breakout as if
they were reporting the annual Spring merchandise sales in the US.
To describe the desperate scramble of people seeking baby food and basic necessities in Egyptian shops
across the border, TIME said: It took explosives to do what diplomacy couldn't: allow Palestinians to go on a shopping spree
– Newsweek and CNN evaluated the incident in terms of a public relations disaster for Israel.
That’s what we journalists call ‘the human touch’.
The Israelis say it is up to the Egyptians to restore the wall and the prison. The Egyptians realise that
popular opinion is with the Palestinians and everybody realises that Palestine is the main excuse for the existence of Al
Qaeda.
What with Gaza, the imminent worldwide economic collapse and climate change, all our lives are going
to become much more interesting very soon.
Copyright©2008 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
Christmas in Hell
John Maxwell
Christmas in Jamaica is bad enough. One good thing about Christmas Day is that it means the end of weeks of aural assaults
by mindless rhymesters perverting songs of worship to paeans of praise for hucksters of all kinds, from shopkeepers to banks,
from autoparts dealers to purveyors of cheap, non-returnable, eminently breakable, non-biodegradable trash tricked out in
plastic, tinsel and lead paint to lure innocent children and entrap their parents. And, as a bonus, there are the sound-system
parties, which allow you to dance in your own home to music played two miles away.
An Alternative Scenario
If you think this is bad, consider another scenario.
Consider that you are a citizen of another land, one steeped in history - a history of resistance to oppression, a history
which includes the first proclamation on Earth that all people were equal, including women and children.
This land, which for convenience we'll call Ayiti, was introduced to Christianity by a bunch of marauding savages bearing
swords and caparisoned in the fierce colours of their leader, a Genoese adventurer named Cristobal Colon, aka Christopher
Columbus. This character had induced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, the monarchs of two Spanish kingdoms -Aragon and Castile
- to bet their farms on the discovery of a new route to China, then as now, the fabulous land of magical herbs, spices and
other goods which would make life bearable for the inhabitants of Europe, just emerging from the Dark Ages.
Our hero had managed to convince Ferdinand and Isabella on the basis of a map obtained from an African who claimed to know
the way to China aka Cipangu. If the Spanish got to Cipangu before their European cousins, great wealth and power would be
theirs; all the tea in China would be theirs for the asking, in addition to carpets, silks and luxuries only dreamt of in
Europe.
When Columbus' "doom burdened caravels" hove to in Ayiti, the million or so people who welcomed him could never have guessed
that they would soon be history. Within thirty years the populations of the West Indies had been so reduced that in the four
larger islands now re-christened the Greater Antilles) less than a thousand remained alive in 1519. This is according to the
testimony of Bartolomeo de las Casas, a Spanish monk who came with the conquistadors and was an eyewitness to the Conquest.
Another historian, Gonzalo Oviedo, estimated that of the one million Indians on Ayiti when the Spaniards arrived, less than
five hundred remained half a century later- the "natives and … the progeny and lineage " of those who first occupied
the land.
‘They died in heaps, like bedbugs …’
In the Caribbean and in Mexico, Peru and Colombia smallpox and other diseases introduced by the Spaniards killed the 'Indians'
by the million. Relatively small Spanish expeditions were able to conquer huge empires because the native populations were
swept away by diseases to which they had never been exposed and for which they had no immunity.
Toribio Motolina, another Spanish priest, wrote that in most provinces in Mexico "more than one half the population died;
in others the proportion was a little less; they died in heaps, like bedbugs."
More than a hundred years after Motolina, a German missionary writing in 1699, said the so-called Indians "die so easily
that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost."
The destruction of the 'American Indian' populations and cultures has meant an incalculable loss to human ethnic and cultural
diversity. It was they who gave us words like barbecue, canoe, hammock and hurricane and crops like corn, potatoes, cassava
and tomatoes. The people of ancient Egypt, the pyramid builders seem very far away in time; the Olmecs, Maya, Aztecs, and
Incas, who also built pyramids and played games very much like basketball, soccer and Jai alai, seem much closer.
To Jamaicans and people of the Caribbean, the sense of loss is almost palpable in relation to the lost civilisations of
Africa, destroyed by the slave trade, which, like globalisation, set brother against brother, tribe against tribe and nation
against nation.
Africa was targeted because the Europeans knew that their own people could not survive for long in the hot, humid, mosquito-ridden
Indies and that sugar, replacing gold, as the commodity most likely to make men rich, was too hard a work for them.
Turning to Africa meant the devastation of many ancient civilisations - many disappearing almost without trace, further
impoverishing mankind's cultural diversity and robbing Africa of the populations and skills it needed for its own development.
Although the Europeans found large quantities of gold, silver and copper in the "New World’, gold was never as lucrative
as sugar and the cotton and rubber extracted from the plantations of the Americas. And nothing was as lucrative as the slave
trade
As Sybille Fischer remarks in her book Modernity Disavowed: "Colonialism in the Caribbean had produced societies where
brutality combined with licentiousness in ways unknown in Europe. The sugar plantations in the new World were expanding rapidly
and had an apparently limitless hunger for slaves."
'A wretch like me!'
One of the modern Jamaicans' favourite hymns at funerals is 'Amazing Grace' penned by a slave trader after he retired from
the trade, rich and comfortable. It was his way of atoning for his crimes, and perhaps, of saying thanks to God.
Nothing can atone for the misery and degradation imposed on the 25 million or more people transported into slavery or the
millions more slaughtered when they fought to avoid capture. Nothing can atone for five hundred years of racist victimisation,
nor the five hundred years of brutality and dangerous behaviours, beaten, inculcated and burned into the psyches of the enslaved
and their descendants.
The inhabitants of Ayiti, now almost all African, like the people of all the enslaved islands and lands of the Americas,
were engaged in an unending struggle to destroy slavery. In Surinam, in Barbados, and Grenada in the United States of America,
in Nicaragua and in the Caribbean the slaves rose time after time to break their chains. In Jamaica they had some success.
The Maroons fought the much better armed British to a standstill and wrested from them a treaty of non-aggression and non-interference
in 1739. It was a treaty soon broken by the British.
Desperation and the will to be free fuelled the Tacky rebellion of 1760. This rebellion dwarfed the Maroon Wars and was
an islandwide conspiracy, which lasted six months. The aims of the leaders included driving out the white population, and
partitioning Jamaica into principalities in the tradition of the Akan-speaking Koromanti who were at the heart of the rebellion.
One of them, a man called Bouckman, fled to Ayiti when the rebellion was finally crushed.
There, in Ayiti, he ignited a struggle for freedom, which ended with the expulsion of the last foreign soldiers from Ayisien
soil.
In 1804, after ten years of warfare, the rebel slaves and their free allies defeated the armies of Napoleon (twice), and
of Britain and Spain. Dessalines declared Ayiti independent and free and declared the country a refuge from slavery anywhere.
He also pronounced the first known declaration of universal human rights, giving legal equality to all human beings, men,
women and children.
It was a hundred and forty four years later, in 1948 that the world caught up with Ayiti in producing the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.
Next December 10, almost exactly a year from now, the world will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nation's
proclamation of the Universal Declaration.
The preamble to the Declaration is not very well known. It goes like this:
" Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family
is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts, which have outraged the conscience of
mankind;
And the advent of a world, in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want
has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny
and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the
dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress
and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal
respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this
pledge,
"Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement
for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly
in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures,
national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of
Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction."
The declaration then proceeds to list the basic principles of the declaration beginning with Article 1.which says that
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should
act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
And it continues to explain in Article 2 that
" Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such
as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other
status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of
the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other
limitation of sovereignty".
The declaration is intended to be universal, as was Dessalines’ declaration in 1804. Unfortunately for us there are
billions of people in this world including many in this country, who do not enjoy all the benefits of this universal declaration.
But some are much worse off than others. Among those are the people of Iraq, of Palestine and right next door to us, the people
of Ayiti, that imaginary place where slavery was abolished by the slaves themselves.
In Ayiti, aka Haiti, these rights and the Universal Declaration do not apply.
Rather like the captured Islamists in neighbouring Guantanamo Bay, a little to their northwest, the Haitians all 8 million
of them, live in a concentration camp. The Haitian version is designed to stifle their freedoms and liberties and engineered
to prevent them from being led by leaders of their own choice.
Nearly four years after US Marine were landed there for the third time in a hundred years, the freely elected president
of Ayiti is an exile in South Africa. He was kidnapped from the presidential palace by US Marines led by the US Ambassador
to Haiti and transported, as "cargo" with his family to the Central African Republic - the American idea of hell on earth.
From there he was rescued in a mission led by the black US congresswoman Maxine Waters and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson.
They chartered a plane and headed off to the Central African Republic themselves to bring President Aristide and his wife
Mildred and their two daughters back to the Caribbean. It took them hours of negotiating with the country’s dictator
to get him to release the Aristides.
President Aristide came to Jamaica where the government felt constrained by tradition and popular sentiment, to welcome
him, but found itself unable to resist US pressure to get him out of the Caribbean.
Aristide's sin was to want to fulfill the mission of his ancestors, to build a paradise on the dungheap left behind by
Haiti’s colonisers and exploiters.
Nearly four years later a Haitian president is in office but Aristide's and his people’s enemies are in power.
The country is ruled by the US Ambassador, and is policed by a so-called United Nations force - MINUSTAH whose second commander,
a Brazilian General killed himself after a friendly chat with leaders of the Haitian elite.
MINUSTAH’s only distinctions are killing a large number of women and children in their pursuit of so-called bandits
who seem to be mainly pro-Aristide youth, and the rape and other sexual abuse of young Haitian children, some as young as
ten.
A Dread of Black Freedom
From the earliest days as an independent nation the Americans have feared and dreaded Haiti. As an asylum for escaped slaves,
it threatened the slave system in the American south. And after France extorted billions of dollars in gold from Haiti in
'compensation' for the loss of capital (slaves) and land, in Haiti, the US lent money to the Haitians to pay the debt and
ruined them with the interest.
As I have said before: while arms never subdued Haiti, it was defeated by the power of financiers in a sinister preview
of the modern tactics of the IMF and the World Bank.
Despite all the harassment, the 10,000 murders of activists and leaders, the Haitian people, united in the Fanmi Lavalas,
have continued to support their leaders and their culture. A few months ago one of their leaders, Dr. Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine,
was kidnapped after a meeting with some Americans. He has not been heard from since. A few weeks later another leader, Dr
Marlyse Narcisse, was kidnapped but released when there was a tremendous howl of Haitian and international outrage that apparently
embarrassed the powers that rule Haiti.
And so the Haitians survive, without rights, at the mercy of a United Nations corrupted and intimidated by the power of
the United States, Canada and France acting in concert.
The United States, Canada, France and Haiti all signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
They all agreed that "… disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts, which have outraged
the conscience of mankind and they promised to make the world a more civilized place.
The spectacle of these three self-styled democracies combining to crush the rights and hopes of 8 million poor people is
obscene, but perhaps not as revolting as the fact that Haiti's relatives and friends in the Caribbean, Jamaica and the others,
but especially Jamaica, can sit and watch the Haitians’ sojourn in Hell as if they were watching a Disney fantasia or
a Christmas Pantomime.
Copyright©2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
A Licence for Malingerers
John Maxwell
The Man from Ham Walk
Jacob Taylor was a short, thick man with the face of an amiable pugilist, the sort of guy children immediately
adopt as a sort of honorary uncle. He was the epitome of the Jamaican civil servant, a man who did his job diligently, without
hope of recognition, without fear, favour or any interest except that of the public he served.
I first met him in the newly established office of the Beach Control Authority ( BCA) on Beechwood Avenue,
just about opposite to the present headquarters of the Jamaica Observer. I was the first reporter to check out the newly established
BCA, I went to interview the Secretary and Chairman of the Authority. Unfortunately the Chairman, Mr H.D Tucker, was
not there but I spoke to the secretary, Mr Dujon and I met a lifelong friend in Jacob Taylor, then his assistant. He was proud
of the fact that he was born in Ham Walk, near Linstead and without doubt its most notable citizen.
For the next forty years Jacob was to devote himself to securing rights of access to Jamaican beaches for
the Jamaican people. Some beaches were easy – nobody was interested in building hotels on them. One such was the Winniefred
Rest Home beach at Fairy Hill in Portland.
That was then.
Other beaches had to be fought for. Jacob was the unassuming general in a guerilla war against private interests
that had recently heard about the attractions of beaches for tourists and were trying to incorporate them into their
estates as quickly and as ruthlessly as possible.
Most of Jamaica’s beaches had until then been of no interest to landowners. Ordinary people
beached their fishing boats or went for dips in the sparkling waters when they chose – often innocent of clothing.
My father, a Baptist parson, often baptized people at Derby beach, now Silver Sands. In the early 1950s it suddenly became
clear that beaches were desirable properties.
Within a few weeks of taking up his job Jacob could probably have recited by heart the Beach
Control Act, Law 56 of 1955,. He was to become the very personification of justice for thousands of Jamaicans, fishermen and
others whose free and easy access to the sea was now threatened by people hoping to make fortunes from tourism.
Jacob took the law seriously, and when he became Secretary of the BCA, aggressively defended the prescriptive
rights of poor people to the beaches despite expensive legal challenges from such as Teddy Pratt of Mammee Bay and Lady Price
of San San. Laughing Water is a public beach reserve, according to the law but not according to the powers that be.
What Jacob could not prevent, was the wholesale annexation of north coast beaches facilitated by the government
of Sir Alexander Bustamante. The first government of independent Jamaica pushed people off the beaches by the simple expedient
of relocating the highway which had until then, run along the coast. The relocation removed the sea views as well as
the access to the beaches. Prospect Beach (‘Reggae beach’), Llandovery and San San were among the more egregious
examples. At San San, before the road was moved, the aptly named Coldhardour Ltd, promoters of the development, put a fence
in the sea beside the road, as I reported in Public Opinion forty years ago. The so-called car park at San San is in fact,
the remains of the public highway and a monument. to land capture by the rich.
In the seventies Jacob renewed his efforts to secure the beaches, introducing training, examination and
certification for lifeguards, and building changing rooms and toilets.
By the time he retired in 1995, he had ensured that of Jamaica’s 488 miles of coastline, there
were 20 miles of public beach to balance the 20 miles of privately licensed beach.
Since then a new breed of public official has emerged, particularly in the UDC – an entity that I
describe as the Ultimate Devastation Conglomerate. Another disaster is the new National Environmental Protection Authority
– NEPA – which some environmentalists describe as Never Ever Protect Anything.
Jacob’s legacy is being destroyed by the erosion of the public’s rights to the beaches. The
UDC fought strenuously to take away the Hellshire beach from the fishermen – claiming to own the beach when the
fishermen did – and bulldozing the houses of the fishermen calling them squatters.. They have also in my view,
cheated the fishermen of their inheritance by restricting them to a smaller than agreed area and by continual harassment which
makes cooperative development of the beach impossible. The UDC wants the beach for an upscale exclusive private development.
NEPA, which in jacob’s day was the NRCA, was asked to do its public duty to protect the public interest
in the prescriptive rights of access to Winniefred beach. They ap[peared to agree and then, without notice to the people who
petitioned them, withdrew from the case without warning or giving any reason.
Beaches and open space are essential for the leisure and recreation of the people. Those who would deny
the people their rights are putting a rod in pickle for themselves. Hellshire and Winniefred Beach in Portland are two of
the last remaining public recreational areas in Jamaica. – areas where people can bathe without danger.
Ninety Days to Perdition
The government's headlong pursuit of the Great Development Myth is going to land all of us in serious trouble
before we are much older.
Tourism is seen as the magic bullet for "Development" and this means destroying the environment of Jamaica
and taking away public rights in order to build cruise ship piers and exclusive resorts for foreigners.
The energy crisis, global warming and the coming worldwide depression will soon put paid to all the dreams
of cruise ship heaven and artificial attractions.. Our frenzied pursuit of tourist-factory-farming will bequeath to us expensive
white elephants in the shape of hotels on beaches ravaged by super hurricanes, cruise ship piers without cruise ships and
a population having to pay for expensive 'developments' which are unable to pay for themselves.
The government, in an effort to cut through red tape and speed up 'development' is proposing to institute
a mandatory 90-day turnaround time for approval of new projects by NEPA.
This will not even allow time for an effective Environmental Imlact Assessment. It seems that developers
are constitutionally unable to give adequate notice of their projects although most of these projects have been months and
years in conception. They wait till the last minute and blackmail civil servants by claiming massive loss of profit if permission
is not granted immediately.
The Jamaica Environmental Action Network (JEAN) – of which I am proud to be a member –
has taken objection to this proposal on the ground that the new rules will open the development process to anarchy.
JEAN
is concerned by two things: one is the inability of the NEPA to make up its mind and to make effective rules for developers
and the other is the fact that when NEPA does make rules it takes no action when these rules are defied, ignored, or broken.
One example, supplied by JEAN will explain the point;
"… the environmental permit granted by NEPA
to Hoteles Pinero Jamaica Ltd. (HOJAPI) to build the Gran Bahia Principe Hotel requires that :- (a) the sewage treatment plant
(STP) be built in accordance with submitted designs; (b) the Ministry of Health be advised before commencement of construction
of the STP, at 50% completion, at 90% completion and on commissioning; and (c) that the effluent from the plant
must confirm to NEPA standards. What in fact happened? The sewage plant was not built according to the specifications,
we are unaware whether or not the Ministry of Health has ever issued an approval letter for the "as built" plant, only one
notification was done at 50% construction, and following tests … the effluent was not in conformance with standards.
None of the three government agencies that could apply sanctions to the hotel – NEPA, the Ministry of Health and/or
the Water Resources Authority – has done so."
If NEPA wants to 'speed up the process of development approval" the simplest option is simply to do nothing.
That is, simply follow their Standard Operating Procedure.
Theoretically, new mining operations require an Environmental Impact Assessment. As far as I know NEPA has
never asked for any, and one result is the new mining pit which will destroy part of the Spur Tree Hill Road out of Mandeville
(see photograph) The people of Mandeville were never given the opportunity of deciding whether they wanted their landscape
disfigured and their road destroyed. They are allowed to watch it happening, without the intervention of NEPA or any other
government authority.
NEPA's demonstrated preference is for what Jacob Taylor described to me years ago as the ultimate
deterrent to action by civil servant: "Masterly Inactivity" – a process made into an art form by NEPA. The procedure
is simple: documents are simply passed from one functionary to another, each declining responsibility, until one day the file
ends up on the floor of some secure vault, an archive of blasted hope and frustrated initiative. Under the new rules, this
is the way forward.
I believe that the Prime Minister and his Minister of Health and Environment should meet urgently with members
of the environmental and public interest lobby. If we Jamaicans do not understand the rules and procedures of sustainable
development we will find ourselves in a political and economic backwater, drifting aimlessly in a sea of pollution, erosion
and despair. The environmental lobby is not against development, it is simply opposed to unsustainable, destructive
and expensive “Development”.
There are numberless examples of the perils of uncontrolled, unmonitored and unregulated development, from
Times Beach and the Love Canal, to Minimata and the poisoned rivers and flattened forests of Amazonia.
All of those disasters happened in places with lots more land space than ours, yet their effects have been
horrendous. Our small size means that our mistakes will be magnified. The sewage from the houses at San San will eventually
destroy the swimming there. The sewage in the sea at Bahia Principe (see photo) will poison not only those to the windward
– the people of Pear Tree Bottom – but everyone beyond. The sewage from Portmore and Kingston Harbour is now being
exported to Hellshire and points west. Fertiliser from sugar estates and sewage from hotels is ending up on Negril’s
corals and beaches.
Jamaica is a small place and we cannot afford to make even small mistakes. The world is a small place
and every mistake we make is added to every other mistake made by everyone else.
That's why the Arctic icecap is melting and the beaches are disappearing at Negril.
We have only one Earth, one Jamaica. And we have one duty, not to leave the world a worse place than we
found it and in fact, to make it better for those who follow us.
Copyright©2007John Maxwell
A Mess of Pottage ?
John Maxwell
The proponents of Unsustainable Development have not had a good week.
The people of Jamaica and the world are waking up to discover what they stand to lose if the Jamaica Bauxite
Institute and the bauxite mining companies get their sweaty hands on the Cockpit Country – The Land of Look Behind.
From all over the world, support has been building for the preservation of this singular treasure. A few
letters have been printed in the Press and the talk shows are just beginning to reflect public anger. But perhaps the single
most damaging fact to the cause of the JBI et al was the announcement a few days ago, that a new cancer drug has been extracted
and developed from an endemic jamaican plant.
This is much bigger news than the simple fact that this drug is proving effective against certain
forms of cancer. It is more important because this is the second major discovery of the treasures hidden in the Jamaican
portion of the biosphere.
As I reported 253 columns ago scientists had discovered “On the roots of the mangroves
in Kingston Harbour and perhaps elsewhere in Jamaica, … a tiny animal, smaller than the first joint in the average
adult’s little finger, an orange-coloured soft-bodied creature which looks more like a flower than an animal. The name
of this insignificant beast is Ecteinascidia turbinata – known to its admirers as a sea-squirt. It
is one of a number of marine animals which manufacture proteins that are proving effective in fighting cancer and may yield
substances which may be able to defeat other diseases. A big Spanish drug company, PharmaMar, has bought the rights to a new
drug derived from one of the sea-squirt’s proteins. … “Early trial results have indicated that
ET-743 may eventually play a role in treating certain soft tissue sarcomas and other cancers including advanced-stage
breast, colon, ovarian and lung cancer, melanoma, mesothelioma and several types of sarcoma … Ecteinascidin
not only shrinks and kills tumours, it also restricts cancer’s ability to resist other drugs “
(Infinite Injustice – March 17, 2002)
In another column, nearly a year later, I reported on the government’s plans to devastate another
priceless, world scientific resource – an unprepossessing wilderness place called Harris Savannah, just off the
Doomsday Highway near May Pen, which one of the world’s most noted botanists, Dr George Proctor thinks is a botanical
treasury of world importance.
“After rain, Harris Savannah is a botanical bonanza, full of species unknown until Proctor discovered
them. Many are new to science. Apart from their intrinsic interest to botanists, some could be of profitable horticultural
economic interest, others may contain substances which may lead to important medical or other scientific advances.
Most of the world’s standard medications are made from compounds first discovered in plants
and other ‘insignificant‘ forms of life.” – (Treasure in the Badlands Nov. 29, 2003)
In a press release two weeks ago, the head of the jamaica Bauxite Institute described the campaign against
the destruction of the Cockpit Country as ‘almost hysterical’ – which may or may not be a reference to the
fact that so many active environmentalists in jamaica are women. I must confess that I too have a long history of ‘almost
hysteria’ dating back, perhaps, to the time when Dr Lyew Ayee was a baby. This year makes fifty years since I led a
successful campaign in Public Opinion weekly to force the Caribbean Cement Company to install electrostatic precipitators.
These scrubbers recovered seven tons of dust daily, from the smokestack of the company which, until then, had been choking
the lungs of Jamaicans high and low.
If that was ‘almost hysteria’ Dr Lyew Ayee can make as much of it as he wants.
Campaigning for a National Minimum Wage (on Public Eye) and for disarming jamaica and against the death
penalty and against the rape of Hope Gardens may also have been ‘almost hysterical.’ I really don’t care
what Dr Lyew Ayee calls me or my allies. What we care about is what unsustainable development is likely to do to Jamaica.
For instance:
It was reported, some years ago, that the NRCA had turned down a foreign exchange earning development project
to build an incinerator in jamaica to burn imported toxic wastes. I would like to ask Dr Lyew Ayee whether, had he been a
member of the NRCA Board at the time, would he have voted for or against the proposal? I would like to ask the question of
several other people, including the former Prime Minister among others, because it is the sort of question which in my view,
separates the ‘almost hysterical’ from the sound, sober, reliable forward thinking people who only have Jamaica’s
best interest at heart.
Water, water everywhere and …
In the Manifesto of the People’s National Party in 1997, the Party declared its commitment to
“work toward creating a society of high moral values and attitudes; the party best able to unite the people into one
common band marching to the goal of creating a better quality of life for all;
Lest it be misunderstood that the Party was speaking about foreign exchange, the next sentence makes it
clear what the PNP considered the components of a “better life”
“Protecting and conserving our island’s resources is an imperative, if we are to preserve its
natural features and beauty.
Man is dependent on the integrity of the environment and there is a sacred obligation to protect God’s
earth and to preserve the quality of life for future generations.
The PNP believes that orderly development can and must co-exist with a healthy respect for the natural resources
that sustain development.
We have therefore pursued a collaborative national effort with the private sector and individual communities,
to rescue areas of the environment that are under siege.” [my emphasis]
The Cockpit Country is one of those areas now under siege and it may be the most important such area, worthy,
as the government once believed, of being declared a World Heritage Site.
In 1997 the Government was just four years into a commitment to ratify the SPAW Protocol of the Cartagena
Convention. The founder of Greenpeace International, the late David McTaggart, told me he considered SPAW the single most
effective piece of international legislation for the protection of habitat and life forms and he made three visits to Jamaica
to be assured by three different Ministers of Environment, that Jamaica would soon ratify SPAW. Although the document
itself is housed at the International Seabed Authority’s Headquarters just a few hundred yards from Gordon House, where
our parliament meets, the government has not seen fit so far to honour its promise. Jamaica is the only siginficant signatory
not to have ratified SPAW and while the SPAW document lives in Jamaica, Jamaica’s representatives to SPAW meetings
are Observers only, not members.
This is clearly sound, anti-hysterical behaviour.
But the governing Party has clearly broken important promises to jamaica, or at the very least, not remembered
to fulfil them
The PNP manifesto (p 49) made explicit promises in 1997:
“… During our third term we will:
• Undertake a comprehensive programme to clean up the physical environment and to protect our beaches,
watersheds, reefs and other sensitive ecosystems;
• revitalise our national parks and gardens and establish additional national and marine parks
…The
new millennium is the time to reaffirm our responsibility to protect and enhance our environment, so that the country we hand
over to future generations, will be a better place to live in.”
Pretty strong words, but the party was not content with that; on page 71, under the title:
“Our Pledge” the party drew a line in the sand:
“… • to protect and safeguard
our environmental heritage, thereby protecting our fragile ecology for the benefit of future generations.
That, of course,
sounds almost hysterical to me, given Hope Gardens and Long Mountain and Harris Savannah and the Doomsday Highway and Bloody
Bay and Pear Tree Bottom and Point, and Palmyra and Winniefred Beach.
American hysteria
On the website of the US Army Corps of Engineers there is a fascinating document of 118 pagesincluding appendices
etc.
This document is called “Water Resources Assessment of Jamaica” and is dated February 2001.
As a technical military document the Assessment is, as might be expected, a dry, businesslike paper, all 118 pages of it.
It even includes the latitutude and longitude of every Jamaican locality mentioned in the text and you may be interested to
know that the coordinates for Albert Town are 1817 N 07733 W. The authors are very meticulous. There may be however,
some cause for alarm in developer circles, all three specialists who carried out the assessments are geologists but since
they are all women, there is clearly some possibility that their conclusions may be regarded as ‘almost hysterical”.
However:
“This information may be used to sup
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