Virtual Tourism in a Floating Paradise

John Maxwell

The Port Authority of Jamaica is clearly one of Jamaica’s most sophisticated public entities; they even appear to have a vice-president in charge of delivering bad news. This gentleman, Mr Pat Belinfanti was quoted round the world, according to Google, about 34,000 times two weeks ago as saying ‘Jamaica suspends port expansion, blames economy’.

Papers as diverse as the Seattle Times, the International Herald Tribune and the Taiwan News reported that “ Jamaica is suspending plans for a multimillion-dollar expansion of a popular tourist port in Kingston because no one wants to finance it.”

I was bemused by the mention of a ‘popular tourist port in Kingston’ since I couldn’t figure out where such a place might be.

Here is the core of the story:

”A spokesman for the island's port authority says the $122 million project at the Kingston Wharf will be pushed back one year. Pat Belinfanti says construction might start in 2011.

He said Friday that several international banks backed off, citing the global financial crisis after initially saying they might finance the project.

The development would include construction of duty-free shops and a renovation of the nearby Port Royal town as a cruise ship destination.”

The figure of US$122 million appeared to indicate that what might actually have been zapped was the monstrous Falmouth Cruise ship facility Phase One of the Human Zoo planned for Trelawny. The rest of the story appearing to be simply journalistic confetti, scattered to deflect the anti=spin missiles of the foreign press. No such luck.

What is admirable about the Port Authority is that, like their paragon, the UDC (Ultimate Devastation Conglomerate) they gallantly refuse to take no for an answer and like the Light Brigade, will continue charging into the jaws of death, into the gates of hell, if only to deliver their latest press release or to try to borrow even more money while they cannot service their current debt, incurred while no one was looking.

 What really seems to have happened is that the Port Authority has recently suffered some serious financial setbacks and is in the process of drawing in its horns.

In the Gleaner of Dec 11  a story written by Arthur Hall says “The worldwide financial meltdown has started to hit Jamaica's ports, delaying one major project and causing some international financiers to shy away from another.

In addition, there has been a 15 per cent decline in domestic cargo moving through the ports since August. A noisily trumpeted 5 year contract with Maersk, the world’s largest shipping line (2005) disintegrated before the contract was even halfway done.

Chairman of the Port Authority of Jamaica, Noel Hylton, said plans to begin the expansion of the transshipment port in the Fort Augusta area of St Catherine in 2010 have been shelved, with the project now slated to begin a year later.”

Reality is clearly setting in this area. In another area I am not so sure. Arthur Hall’s story says that the high cost of capital may also  be damaging the immediate prospects of the amazing proposed cruise shipping pier in Falmouth where the PA needs $US122 million to seal the deal

As the world’s risk takers sprint for the exits, Jamaica’s gallant Port Authority stands unfazed :  ”we have about eight banks which have indicated a willingness to offer financing," Hylton said; "The question of getting the financing is not the problem for us ... The problem is the cost of the financing and in today's world, financing costs can be very high," said Hylton.

You can say that again, but you shouldn’t need to. Jamaica has lots of experience with usury. (Eight banks!)

Why anyone should consider destroying Falmouth has never been clear to me, especially to replace it with the Disneyfied monstrosity proposed by the Port Authority in cahoots with Royal Caribbean. Everything is being done at a very high level of course and environmentally concerned people like us just need to shut up and take our medicine.

The medicine is going to be potent. While parliamentary committees gave been reassured that Falmouth will be no danger to the cruise shipping industry, no such guarantees have been given to the  Jamaican hoteliers whose customers regard Jamaica as the attraction.

Travelling Cities

THe challenge of the new mega-cruise ships is to the land based hotels and their employees.

Look at the picture accompanying this column.

The Oasis of the Seas will make land-based hotels irrelevant. Instead of bringing visitors to Jamaica the new ships will offer an ersatz Jamaica to the visitors. Each of these ships will be human zoos specially designed to so bemuse their clientele that it will soon be possible to offer -- in a plain brown wrapper -- a virtual tourism product in the privacy of your own home. I’m sure they’re working on it. In the meantime Royal Caribbean says The  Oasis of the Seas  will be a state-of-the-art 'travelling city' – the largest and most revolutionary cruise ship in the world. The Oasis  will feature seven distinct neighbourhoods including a shopping mall and a Green zone: The cruise liner will have its own ‘Central Park’. (Applause!!!)

The liner’s 220,000 gross registered tons (GRT)will carry 5,400 guests in 2,700 staterooms on 16 decks (and 5,000 crew)

Oasis  will be the first ship to demonstrate the Royal Caribbean’s concept of seven distinct themed neighborhood areas, which include a Central Park, Boardwalk, the Royal Promenade, the Pool and Sports Zone, Vitality at Sea Spa and Fitness Center, Entertainment Place and Youth Zone.

Do not Pass GO!

According to the literature each ship’s central park will be basically a mini ‘jungle’ themed to reflect an imaginary island, say Jamaica, no doubt with its quota of  iguanas, crocodiles, parrots, humming birds and other “authentic’ simulacra of the ‘authentic’ island experience, about as much authentic ‘nature’ as a couch potato can stand and making it unnecessary to actually visit the place.

One cannot help hoping that these benefactors of the sea will have the forethought to include appropriate accommodation to display retired politicians and other ginnigogs  in their natural habitat.

Given all this, the rationale for the Falmouth cruise shipping centre is simple: There’s got to be somewhere to dump the huge amounts of waste generated by such an environmentally unfriendly project. Falmouth’s destiny is to act as a relief point for the ship to be sanitised, resupplied with cheap Jamaican water and for the ship its passengers and crew to offload their excrement in what will become the tourist crapital (sic) of the world.

You read it here first.

Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell

Jankunnu@gmail.com

The Wealth of the Poor

John Maxwell

It starts, as everything does, in the slums. These are high-class English slums, though, where Mrs Thatcher and her acolytes have been able to prove that when the state abandons its responsibilities there is indeed, no such thing as ‘Society”

 Despite this, judges are still willing to sentence teenagers to jail sentences longer than they have been alive, and to denounce said teenagers for their “brutality and cowardice and lack of discipline, training and honour”. In an exquisitely oxymoronic Thatcherism, people deprived of their rights and their dignity by the state are to be punished by the state for their depravity.

In Britain, in Liverpool this week an 18 year old boy, disturbed, dysfunctional and the product of a dysfunctional social and economic background, was sentenced to 22 years in jail for murder. The teenager had been trying to shoot one of his teenage  enemies and hit an 11 year old innocent in error.

Fortunately, it was not Jamaica, or we would have had street-dancing to celebrate another death sentence.

The Poverty of the Rich

At this moment the British and other capitalist realists are abandoning the welfare state,  in order to encourage self reliance among the working class; they are, simultaneously seizing the commanding heights of the economy in a programme of nationalisation designed to calm, revitalise and recapitalise the failed capitalist economy.

What is good for the rich is not good for the poor.

Except that some formerly rich are now, due to their own efforts, not so rich anymore. In New York, a week ago, a friendly gentleman with the face of a kindly gnome and unknown to most people rich or poor, confessed that he had managed to obliterate wealth the equivalent of the GDP of Cuba or Luxembourg. This  man known  previously only to a close and select circle of very rich people, , disclosed that he, singlehanded, had struck a grievous blow against capitalism, destroying fortunes, wiping out whole charitable foundations and leaving a great many people, many of them his friends wondering exactly what had hit them.

Mr Bernard Madoff, a quiet unassuming securities broker, had managed, over the last 20 years or so, to transform himself from a mere broker to a high-class money manager, a safe pair of hands for delicate funds requiring rapid multiplication. Mr Madoff was the soul of discretion. He didn’t take money from just anyone. You had to be recommended, to be a member of one of his golf clubs or possibly, a patron of the hairdressing salon where Mr Madoff got $65 haircuts and $50 pedicures. The super-rich begged to be allowed to meet him.

Mr Madoff  it is now apparent, took a lot of people to the cleaners, among them, his nearest and dearest friends and even his own family. He damaged several banks in France, Spain and England, wrecked a number of hedge funds  and charitable foundations, and has managed to generate an enormous amount of distrust among the growing gaggle of millionaires and billionaires who cannot abide the thought that their excess riches are not somehow, generating even more excess, pullulating like spirogyra in  a stagnant swimming pool..

The Madoff swindle is a classic Ponzi scheme, such as some we have had here , where investors are paid ‘dividends’ from the investments of people who come into the scheme later. Basically, it is another version of the privatisation of development. In this scenario, governments are forbidden to borrow from their own people’s resources. This was called printing money. Governments  must be forced to borrow from private usurers whose resources come out of the same consumers (erstwhile taxpayers) from  whom the government is forbidden to  borrow. Since these resources come out of the surplus value created by the consumers themselves in the form of profit margins, they (consumers/taxpayers)  have no claim on any share of it as they would have, were their taxes being used.  Capitalist democracy means that in Jamaica, 35% of our taxes go to the government and  65% goes to the usurers. In the privatisation scenario, the government taxes, which would have gone straight into bridges and social security are instead diverted to be sanitised by the banking system and then lent back to the government at greatly increased cost because of course, the private sector must get its proper tribute.

This process, the so called financial system resembles a multilayered casino, in which several different forms of gambling take place depending on the taste and affluence of the gamblers. At the beginning of the Bush administration the world was startled by what was then the world’s greatest corporate bankruptcy, the Enron disaster. In this boondoggle the Enron geniuses devised a whole slew of so called financial ‘vehicles’ – basically different  forms of scratch and win multimillion dollar  bets. In the process Enron managed to steal billions from the citizens of California  by cornering the market in energy and forcing the Californians to pay extortionate prices for electricity.

In the latest crisis of capitalism now wracking the world, the prime suckers were the poor and underprivileged of the United States. It was suddenly realised that no matter how poor these people were, if you got enough of them together in the same corral, you could get important money out of them. People who had been denied housing loans because of their race or income were suddenly eligible, and -whether they could or could not pay for a whole house, were able to pay for at least several months. This was fine. When the mortgage was foreclosed the process would begin again and again. Except that as more and more people ‘bought’ houses, the prices of houses rose, and soon, more and more of the mortgages were for overvalued housing bought by people who could not pay. The avalanche of foreclosures made the situation even worse, as people were now paying for  houses worth much less than they were supposed to be.

In the meantime, bundles of these mortgages were being packaged and sold as ‘securities’  — debentures — rock solid investments.  As soon as the foreclosures began the bubble burst.

In the Enron catastrophe, in the toxic mortgage disaster and recession and in the Madoff debacle, there is one constant. The regulators, the overseers, the auditors, the protectors of the public interest were at all material times, non-functional. This of course means that the ‘system’ is an unsupervised racket.

The Paupers Pay

Transparency International and other NGOs whose purpose is to back up the usury of the International Financial Institutions, have very little to say about these catastrophic failures of private sector governance. This is so despite the fact that these recent  failures have cost us more than all the government failures in history.

The double standard is crude and easily recognisable. In the US, the taxpayer is seen to have a duty to rescue the financial industry and its grossly overpaid minions. The taxpayer, according to the Republican party, has no business rescuing the auto industry, because the workers in that industry are unionised and earn too much.

Nobody appears to have noticed that the securitisation of the sub-prime mortgages in the US was an almost exact analogue to the privatisation of Third World debt a few years earlier.

And that is why the current recession will become a global depression and why all of us need to do some serious emergency thinking, mainly about growing food and achieving food security.

Mr Bartlett, the Minister for Tourism, apparently believes it is unpatriotic or shameful to anticipate hard times ahead for tourism or for the coutnry as a whole. I would ask him to consider this: The collapse of bauxite is part of the general collapse of the commodities market which is a part of the general economic malaise precipitated by the collapse of the big financial institutions, the disappearance of credit and the collapse of the stock market. Embedded in this are other factors such as the collapse of the general housing market, hedge funds and widespread unemployment,  expecially in the financial industries.

Where in that scenario does Mr Bartlett discern hope for a vibrant tourism industry and a sparkling economy?

Copyright 2008© John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

Investors in limbo

I

JOHN MAXWELL Sunday, December 14, 2008

There is one fault line in American life that not even Barack Obama can heal; it is the chasm between those who believe OJ Simpson killed his wife and those who don't.

I must make it clear at once that I don't believe OJ did it.

My reason is simple: I cannot imagine anyone, having just butchered two people, being able to make himself and his house presentable within an hour or so of the bloody killings, and then embarking on an aeroplane flight halfway across the United States, leaving his house open to be searched by any police force - even one as incompetent as the Keystone Kops of the Los Angeles Police.

In the days they had to examine Simpson's house the LAPD could not find one single piece of incriminating evidence - nothing to connect Simpson to the crime. To rid his house of bloodstained clothing and any trace of incriminating DNA in an hour is beyond the capacities, I believe, of even highly trained decontamination experts and, in my view, stratospherically out of reach to a booby like Simpson.

Only an innocent booby could have dared to write a book speculating how he could have committed the murders of his wife and her friend Ron Goldman. And only a booby would not have realised that there was something very odd about the expedition he was persuaded to lead to recover his property from a Las Vegas hotel room.

The Goldman and Brown families, who obviously hate Simpson from the word go, have never wavered in their belief that OJ was the killer. They know, and like all fundamentalists their knowledge is absolute, immanent and incontrovertible.

They have managed to trap Simpson twice, with two hand-picked juries - getting a wrongful death civil verdict against Simpson and now, getting him jailed on the most obviously rigged evidence in proceedings which I would think do not dignify even such a state as Nevada.

It all came out in the wash. The gang behind Simpson, including the lone gunman, have all got away more or less scot-free. The goat, Simpson, will probably spend the rest of his life in jail if a real court cannot be found to end this travesty of justice.
If people are to be jailed because they are fools, the world would clearly have more people in jail than outside. OJ Simpson will die for their sins.

OJ's sin was that he 'wanted to live like a white man', according to Newsweek at the time, a capital offence on the same order as Saddam Hussein's pretensions. The difference, of course, was that Saddam actually killed people, like some other leaders more powerful than he.

I really don't believe that Simpson killed anyone. But to say this is extremely unfashionable.

Entitlements

John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson both believed that black people had been so historically disadvantaged that a century after the abolition of slavery, some reparation in kind would be only just. They were persuaded in this by the advocacy of the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s and Affirmative Action was one result. Affirmative Action was designed to help all of the oppressed, women, ethnic minorities and other politically handicapped classes to get to a position where they could compete on approximately level terms with those who had historically enjoyed privileges out of the reach of ordinary people.

In the '80s and '90s, after the Reagan revolution, it became an article of faith that welfare subsidies - standard in most civilised countries - were in the United States a means to give excessive privilege to women and blacks, especially to the poorest. Mr Bush's so-called Justice Department actually entered appearance as a friend of the court in a celebrated case five years ago on the ground that using quotas to determine ethnic diversity in universities was unconstitutional and breached the right to equal protection under the law.

In capitalist society, of course, inequality is built into the system. Some are owners and others are workers. In the development of the market system in the US, however, some workers are clearly more equal than others. Over the past 50 years some white-collar workers have captured the commanding heights of corporations, and the owners, the stockholders, have been relegated to being bit players in their own productions. With the departure of the first entrepreneurs, the second and third generations of owners have become spectators as professional "managers" have taken control of the corporations and have enriched themselves beyond the dreams of commonplace avarice. They pay themselves bonuses in the millions whether their companies are booming or failing.

This week one of the Napoleons of the new capitalism demanded a bonus of $10 million after 11 months as chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, perhaps the most famous financial services company in the world. John Thain's basic compensation is about $15 million a year, and in the time that he has been with Merrill, the company became the most high-profile casualty of the current financial disaster, having to be rescued in a takeover by the Bank of America financed by the government of the United States.

Despite this disaster, or perhaps because of it, Thain seemed to believe he was entitled to some super profit. The immediate howl from newspapers, bloggers and others appeared to have persuaded him to withdraw his claim. Thain and others like him are the people most vociferous in attacking the wicked trade unions, particularly the United Autoworkers whose members are derided as parasites battening on poor, helpless companies like General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Suddenly the US press has begun to examine the claims against the unions and have discovered that the imaginary millionaires of the UAW are paid just a little more than the non-unionised workers in the American factories of Toyota and Honda. They have discovered that it isn't the unions that are responsible for the state of the US auto industry, but the exorbitantly paid bosses, still building cars for the fifties while the Japanese and Europeans are building cars people actually want to buy.

The government's rescue of the auto industry will bring some unlooked-for changes in US motor vehicle manufacture. Congress and Barack Obama are thought to want more environmentally friendly cars. They also want the manufacturers to change their focus to include railway engines and other forms of public transportation. When the taxpayer owns GM, life for everybody will be very different.

Unlike wealthy countries like Messrs Golding's and Shaw's Jamaica, the US will soon confront a future in which private transportation will be a luxury.

Another world

In Jamaica important facts surface briefly like drowning fish in Kingston Harbour, never to be heard from again. While Mr Golding was busy backing the Spanish hotel developers it was reported almost by the way:

"The project is receiving funding of US$100 million from Spanish investors and US$80 million from Jamaica's National Commercial Bank and will provide employment for more than 1,000 Jamaicans at a time when other hotel projects, including Trelawny's multi-billion-dollar Harmony Cove and the 2,000-room Excellence Group rest in limbo.(http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner//lead/lead2.html)

Resting in limbo, indeed. And this despite the enormous sums of Jamaican taxpayers' money spent on the expensive physical infrastructure for these Arabian nights fantasies.

The problem is that all the super-fancy resort developments are in trouble or will be soon. They are facing the double whammy of worldwide tight credit and an evaporating high-end consumer market. I confidently expect to hear that the monstrous cruise ship, Oasis of the Seas, is on hold, to be followed by immediate comfort statements from Jamaica telling us all not to worry: Falmouth will be destroyed anyway.

David Jessop asked last week what we are going to do now that the British and the Europeans are imposing new taxes on air travel to faraway places like the Caribbean, designed to slash the effect of aviation on global warming.

We are not planning any responses to these disasters, depending instead on rescue by Brazilian investors in ethanol - food for cars - when we need to get people to plant backyard food gardens and transform idle sugar land to growing food. I pointed out a few years ago that, on acreage equal to that of Monymusk - one of the smallest Jamaican sugar estates - farmers in Florida were producing US$60 million worth of citrus. We are clearly too advanced for anything like that.

We will, of course, be able to eat bauxite.

Copyright 2008 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

The People are the Change

John Maxwell

 

I’m sure it is possible to second guess Barack Obama.

I’m sure it is possible to outrun Usain Bolt.

I’m pretty certain I won’t be around to witness either event.

The real value of Barack Obama is the fact that millions of people round the world have incorporated Obama into their own dreams, almost into their own personas.

After the foul miasma of the last few years has begun to clear it was almost inevitable that when our most outlandish wish came true, against all the odds, we would bundle all our hopes and aspirations into the skinny kid with the funny name who spoke of change as if it were important and –  that he meant what he said.

In this atmosphere of swirling myth and springtime tears, it is easy to forget Bismarck’s apothegm: politics is the art of the possible. “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable - the art of the next best” said the founder of Germany; John Kenneth Galbraith’s apparent dismissal of Bismarck is in fact a confirmation –”Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

Thousands of bloggers and people supposedly learned in the craft of politics, have been having conniptions because Barack Obama has not chosen to break out of the American political system in some revolutionary expedition to wipe all slates clean and to dry every tear.

Obama, like Lincoln and Roosevelt before him, or Bismarck himself or Fidel Castro or Jean Bertrand Aristide – is not a freak of nature but the perfectly logical crystallisation of his people’s dreams. And these dreams have always been various, coalitions of desire which can never be wholly fulfilled because some are always at odds with others. The most fundamental ideals of all,  Freedom and Liberty, mean many different things to any different people. Harmonising these contradictions in the interest of the greater good is the essence of what we call politics.

Some pundits have declared that in choosing Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and Lawrence Summers among others, Obama has sold out. Sold out to the past, to the Clintons, to the status quo.

They don’t understand Obama – who does? – and they don’t understand politics.

In the American presidential system it is the President who makes policy: foreign policy and domestic policy, social policy and economic. When a President Obama assembles a team he is choosing people who understand  that the US has one President at a time – even when that President is as totally unfitted for the position as was George Bush. I am not being wise after the event: I said so when Bush was about to be appointed to the job by the US Supreme Court.

As I wrote almost exactly 8 years ago, on Friday December 8, 2000 in a column published in this paper on December 10, two days later:

“ Most of us still  know nothing about what is going on [in Florida’s Supreme Court] of course, because our media is too busy congratulating itself to notice the titanic struggle taking place an hour’s flying time from Kingston. Like the people of the United States, we have been carefully screened from the truth. The real George Bush, if he is appointed President, will use his time to destroy the integrity of the country he rules, starting with the Supreme Court. Then he can start on dealing with  the rest of us.  That’s his job, and as the American Press has made plain, nothing needs to be known about him and his  multifarious incapacities because Big Brother in the giant corporations will tell him what to do. We are all in a for a very rough ride.”

We’ve had the ride, and I forecast some of that too, in the same column:

‘The approaching triumph of Greenspan/Ayn Rand capitalism may just be slowed down by the latest developments in the US economy, but that is not cooling down the ardour of the ‘Cognitive Elite’ to gain a handle on the whole business of corporate control of the economies and governance of the world. ‘

 

Some of us find it really easy to forget unpleasant experience particularly at the hands of someone we were told to trust.  This forgetfulness  allows us to survive all kinds of horrors, but makes it difficult to appreciate just how far the world has travelled since November 4, and how much farther we have to travel.

If we have really observed Obama we might have noticed that he is a man who writes his own script and that he likes to stick to that script, because he knows it makes sense. And he understands too that the best leaders make the best followers, because, more than most, they understand what is to be done. And in Obama they have a leader who they know, from personal experience, is not easily diverted and not willing to surrender his mandate to anyone,

Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s most significant triumph will, I predict, be in Palestine, followed by Darfur, Cuba and Haiti. Just as the anti-communist Republican Richard Nixon was peculiarly qualified to come to terms with China, so, I believe will Hillary Clinton find it possible to secure in the Middle East the peace that Obama wants and the world thirsts for. Barack Obama’s grandfather was tortured by the British in Kenya on suspicion of being tied to Mau Mau. It will be impossible for Obama, with his history, to condemn any people or nation to be the chattels of any other nation.

Even in the highly unlikely event that Mrs Clinton wished to design her own foreign policy she would find it impossible in a Cabinet that also includes Joseph Biden, Bill Richardson and Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the UN. These people know how the world works and they all understand as Bush never did, that the United Sates needs, especially at this juncture, to work with the world.

Great orchestras often contain several maestros, but their pride is in the music they collectively produce under a great conductor. But the same orchestra can sound quite different with another great conductor.

‘We are the change we seek …’

Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the University of South Africa’s “African Renaissance Journal” prompted by Obama’s March speech “Towards a more Perfect Union.” In that piece I analysed Obama’s reaction to the kitchen sink assaults on his character, particularly the episode involving the Rev Jeremiah Wright. I commented then that Obama had moved

“… away from defending himself to a defense of his country, with all its faults, as a state which could be made a more perfect union if its citizens moved together to concentrate on the goals that united them, rather than the grievances that divided them. Neither blacks nor whites had a monopoly on grievances against the other, and it was time for each to understand the roots of their grievances and to use that understanding to create a more perfect union.”

I concluded by commenting that ”Americans may at last be becoming more interested in what unites, rather than what divides them.”

At that time I was counting no chickens; the nomination let alone the election, were still months away.

As it turned out, however, the speech was a tactical and strategic masterstroke that, in my view, accomplished something that even Martin Luther King could not have done, nor be expected to have done. It ripped away the political burkas behind which Americans were hiding from each other, exposing them to each other and to the fact, as King had prophesied, that the time would come when a man’s worth would be judged by his character rather  than by the colour of his skin. George Bush and Dick Cheney had a great deal to do with that epiphany.

History was changed when Americans recognised, for the first time at last, that there was no white or black America, no blue or red America but possibly, and with Obama as their singer-man, probably, hopefully, there could be a United States of America

They began to understand that they needed above all, a community organiser who could restore their humanity and their community; who could and would deal with their divisions and their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

The rest is up to the people.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

The Human Zoo

John Maxwell

There is an ancient joke about an American tourist being shepherded round Europe on a package tour, collecting places without ever experiencing them. One morning his wife asked him: “Where are we? His bemused answer:  ‘If this is Tuesday this must be Paris.’

The cruise ship business is even more soulless than the land based package tour. Cruise ships are floating amusement parks designed to delude you into believing that you are taking part  in  a mind expanding experience – travelling to foreign countries to partake of the local culture. In fact the stops in the various islands of convenience are basically to buy cheap water and to allow the crew a day to clean the ship and make it ready for the next day of cruising and boozing and goofing off at great expense.

 

Ginnigogs Rule

Aeons ago, shortly after returning from my exile in the UK, I attended a press conference called by the entity called the Urban Development Corporation and featuring the UDC’s Chairman  Moses Matalon and the Minister under whose portfolio the UDC then fell –Mining and Natural Resources. The Minister was Allan Isaacs and I will never forget his astonishment and then rage when in answer to one of my questions, Mr  Matalon admitted that the UDC, then five years old, had never published an annual report, as it was supposedly bound to do.

The Minister publicly exacted an undertaking from Mr Matalon to publish annual reports covering the UDC’s first five years.

And that may have been the reason that Mr Matalon later described me as an over-educated Rasta – wrong on both counts. His five annual reports were combined in one short lavishly illustrated brochure, in which it was revealed that the Universal Devastation Conglomerate had incurred a significant proportion of Jamaica's public debt, without the authorisation of parliament. The UDC had simply issued IOUs to American banks, to finance its destruction of downtown Kingston preliminary to reconstructing the city as a modern Miami in the Caribbean. We are still waiting, 35 years later, for the reconstruction. What astonished me then was the fact that Mr Matalon, on his own, could mortgage Jamaica to American banks without the knowledge of Parliament. It did not appear that his former Minister, the famously oversightful Edward Seaga, either knew or cared what was happening.

This week, in a statement to the Gleaner, the head of the Port Authority sounded as if he had inherited Matalon's powers. According to the Financial Gleaner of November 21:

‘The US$102 million that Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Limited (RCCL) is fronting on the Falmouth cruise pier project will not give the American company an equity stake in the port, the Port Authority of Jamaica has said.

‘The funds representing 45.5 per cent of the total project cost of US$224 million is, according to PAJ president and chairman Noel Hylton, a loan to be repaid on a negotiated schedule.’

Repayment

"The matter of repayment is well under consideration; it is expected to take place over an extended period.

The Prime Minister, Mr Golding is clearly au fait with this arrangement. On November 10 the press published a release from the PM’s office to the effect that three days earlier, Mr Golding “ was met by Adam Goldstein, CEO of Royal Caribbean International (RCI) in Kingston, ahead of signing a US$224 M contract to develop the Falmouth Pier to accommodate the world's largest cruise ship in May 2010. Under the contract, the government will invest US$122M to dredge the harbour and construct the pier. RCI will develop the land-based facilities, including shops and attractions.

 According to Mr Hylton, however, there is no joint venture. The Jamaican taxpayer will foot every penny of this extravagant and in my view, mad scheme. The PM’s release hinted otherwise:

‘Under the contract, US$122M will be utilised for harbour dredging and to build the facilities for ships to dock. The other US$102M will be used by RCCL to lease land from the Government, for the construction of all infrastructural development. The facility is due to receive the largest ship in the world come May 2010.’

 

Crazier and crazier

The world is now in the toils of the worst economic crisis in history. Even on CNN, the journalist-millionaire anchors are publicly worrying about their 401(k) nest eggs, rotting away with the stock market. All over the world credit is acutely short. Jamaica owing 137% of its GDP to usurers of various stripes has had its sovereign bonds downgraded to little more than junk. The only source of funds is going to be the IMF, and they will compel us to fire more people and strip our cupboard even barer than it is already. The world’s tourism industries are bawling about the crunch coming from the contraction in disposable incomes. And yet, with our Jamaican hotels on the bones of their balance sheets, we are going to borrow money to destroy the integrity of Jamaica’s loveliest town,, dilapidated though it may be now, in the interest of a foreign corporation. We are prostituting ourselves for a foreign entity with no obligation or loyalty to Jamaica.

It is instructive to learn how the decision was made.

The Custos of Trelawny, speaking at what was alleged to have been a consultation about an Environmental Impact Assessment of the proposed cruise shipping port, said, inter alia “Now, the Port Authority has taken upon itself to make this bold move, and that is to reincarnate as it were, not only the ports of Falmouth but the attendance and glory and historical heritage of the town of Falmouth”

Mr Hylton explained why he was doing all that he was doing for Falmouth. Having developed the ports of Kingston, Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Port Antonio it was Falmouth’s turn to be blessed by the attentions of the Authority.

 Mr Hylton explained what provoked him to build the new port:

“There is a new ship that is being built, which is called 'The Genesis of the Sea', and this ship is capable of taking ten thousand (10, 000) passengers and crew, and we would like to host that ship in Jamaica.”

That is clearly good and sufficient reason to undertake a quarter of a billion US dollar debt. It will allow a foreign corporation to show off the largest and most vulgar expression of  capitalist excess in existence.

The process of site selection, was as one would expect, painstaking and thorough, although Mr Hylton did provoke laughter at one point:

“So, one Sunday morning I drove along the North coast and on arriving in Falmouth I went over the wharf area – actually I had to jump the wall.”

[LAUGHTER]

“And I looked at the place and I thought this is such a beautiful place that we should develop [it] Looking at the historical charm of the place and so on, I thought here it is.”

From the horse’s mouth, as it were, you get confirmation of something I have been saying for years. Nothing so satisfies our developers as the prospect of obliterating natural beauty and charm with concrete and asphalt.

“So, we invited one of the major shipping lines down and we walked this whole town on foot. We walked the whole town, and we thought that there was sufficient materials here to reconstruct the waterfront of this city to bring it back to its original glory. [APPLAUSE] And that morning when the shipping line and myself walked this place, we sat down and we said, let's do it.”

And that was how the decision to brutify Falmouth was taken, with care, deliberation and extensive research.

After more careful deliberation the Port Authority decided to hire a firm to redesign Falmouth

The artist selected for this job was, surprisingly and purely coincidentally no doubt, a firm called Idea Inc. which Mr Hylton described as “an International Design and Entertainment Company. It has developed story lines and thematic approaches for destinations all over the world, and is currently developing port projects in four other Caribbean Islands and Mexico, also a consultant to the world's two major cruise lines, Royal Caribbean and the Carnival Cruise Lines. Its president is with us today, Mr. Hugh Darley, he is the Projects Vision Planner. He is a past Walt Disney Imagineer and has experience in developing projects in over 70 countries. He has developed concepts for the Walt Disney Company, Universal Studios and Paramount.”

 Mr Darley, being a man of great imagination will no doubt bring an entirely new vision to Falmouth, unsullied by his past affiliations and visions. We are going to pay him to mess up Jamaica to the specifications of a foreign corporation

Although the new cruise liners will dominate the landscape and obliterate the view of  Falmouth from the sea, Mr Darley promises to make it so that the two cruise ships with their fifteen or twenty thousand passengers do not ‘overpower’ the seven and a half thousand who live in Falmouth.

As he described it, whatever is architecturally valuable in Falmouth will be incorporated into the new development which will become in effect, a gated community stretching the entire waterfront of Falmouth. There will be a facility to allow nearly two hundred large buses and an unknown number of taxis, to transport the fifteen thousand or so guests to approved attractions, and after their labours, return them to a segregated Market Square and a Merchant Square where nearly half a million square feet of shopping mall will be built and which will incorporate the historic Falmouth Courthouse as a museum including a ‘Rum Bar’

 

Chaos to be built-in

“The idea is that the courthouse could be a living museum; it would be restored and developed to represent what was originally there” according to Mr Darley. This fidelity to history will probably include people playing the parts of the slaves who were originally there. I am not being malicious. In several of the North American examples of historic recreations, blacks are hired to play the parts of slaves to make the experience as true to history as possible. Maybe the one thousand jobs promised for Jamaicans as part of the development will include these, or perhaps they will be part of the fruit and vegetable stalls and the fish stalls and curio stalls which will be among Mr Darley’s “ opportunities for locals to participate in sales within the development through these types of chaos opportunities  all along the waterfront.”[sic]

Wendy Lee, the tireless engine of the Northern Jamaica Conservation Association, was, as usual, a voice crying in the wilderness. “"If this is the complete EIA, it means the terms of reference have not been met because there is no adequate archaeological assessment of the town which is the heritage gem of the north coast,"

She, and many others deplore the extensive, mindless destruction of the phosphorescent lagoon, the wetlands and the other characteristics that make Falmouth uniquely Falmouth.

Trelawny’s famous black crabs will get even shorter shrift than the human inhabitants of Jamaica and Falmouth.

Jamaica is a small country and every development affects all of us. Developers get away with EIAs that treat the immediate neighbours of any development as the ‘interested public’ – as in the Doomsday Highway, where the EIA was debated in a small restaurant in Spanish Town. Projects which should be discussed in Parliament are explained to small audiences in hurriedly arranged meetings in obscure places.

The fallout from these brazen assaults on the Jamaican physical – natural and built – environment is not important; twenty vigorous claqueurs in some church  hall are thought adequate to give Jamaica’s assent to some of the most monumentally destructive and environmentally unsustainable enterprises on earth.

Pretty soon, our people will find themselves cut off from their ocean, with their biodiversity destroyed, their natural heritage and culture debased and their national patrimony owned by others. We won’t be able to swim in our beaches, see our coastline, or explore the intellectually stimulating casinos which will provide the prism and prison bars through which we can view twenty-first century reality where courthouses become museums and justice becomes a rum bar joke.

Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com