Jamaica for Sale

 

John Maxwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eating biodiversity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walk good and take care where you swim.

Copyright© 208 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

reading significance

we listened hard and heard as ocean broke

on quiet beaches and the foamy white

fingers of immense force seemed to delight

in what they touched let our tired feet soak

in the warm salty pleasure of each stroke

of that great hand the day was sharp and  bright

and the whole universe seemed ours by right

we laughed and thought we understood the joke

so much of knowledge is how each can feel

a world of magics at the skin's tight end

without a sense of energy or strain

this case is settled on the first appeal

because we find that each can best attend

to matters that are well set out and plain

take a deep breath

only the wise know just how great is chance

so many fools think gods have things in hand

or huge and smelly demons stalk the land

and dragons must be faced with steady lance 

by men who on their fair chargers will prance

the holy folk who know facts in advance

turn out right quickly not to understand

the difference between brain and upright gland

and blame as magic what is normal dance

we who have watched in silence and in pain

for these long years as matters have got worse

could sense no sure relief from these hard jars

no certain ending to the acid rain

the world was groaning under weighty curse

but clouds have broken and we see the stars

The USA, Free At Last?

John Maxwell

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

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

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

Free at Last ?

The statistics tell some of the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sea Change

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

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

 

“Hi John-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Singer Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that I suppose, makes me another special pleader.

So be it.

Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

possibility

this is bright sunrise on a golden shore

a smile that ends confusion and old night

we get the honest gifts and something more

we'd reached the point where breathing was a chore

day after day the tales added to fright

this is bright sunshine on a golden shore

the face the voice that millions would adore

when at the last they come into our sight

we get the honest gifts and something more

knowledge that hope has evened up the score

our chances now are far better than slight

this is bright sunshine on a golden shore

we turn away from all that we abhor

to cleanse the stain and wash away the blight

we get the honest gifts and something more

together now we open this new door

and go outside to set the world aright

this is bright sunshine on a golden shore

we get the honest gifts and something more

before sunset

in deepest silence thunder is most loud

so long to wait as sun falls into night

so many hope that all will turn out right

each of us hopes the world will make us proud

for far too long  heads bent beneath the cloud

we've let the fools define honest delight

and only said what they let us recite

it was so easy to stay in the crowd

now it is hard to be so cool and calm

as any pebble in a winter stream

when worlds depend upon more than just art

but tired bodies ache for some soft balm

it is not easy to blank out each dream

for joy insists on filling each sore heart

en passant

we make our purpose since we can create

a massive universe within each mind

still in the end we each face the same fate

time ticks at the same space to the same date

so we must turn and face the same hard grind

we make our purpose since we can create

pauper and prince alike have the same state

moving in haste towards an equal bind

still in the end we each face the same fate

a signal comes to those who love and hate

informing us of just what we shall find

we make our purpose since we can create

worlds in an instant bearing the full freight

of love and instinct wholly deaf and blind

still in the end we each face the same fate

uttered in language that we must translate

to fill the ears of all of humankind

we make our purpose since we can create

still in the end we each face the same fate

family tradition

each ancient mango tree marks an old grave

i listen as my father tells the tale

so each sweet fruit is memory of a slave

a rapid flight is all that they could crave

back to the east faster than any sail

each ancient mango tree marks an old grave

in those hard times folk knew how to behave

and on which side of truth to set the scale

so each sweet fruit is memory of a slave

we can't know if they cursed and then forgave

that's not recorded on the bill of sale

each ancient mango tree marks an old grave

so many symbols here that we could save

to make into our kind of holy grail

so each sweet fruit is memory of a slave

those lives were ordinary nothing brave

about survival only not to fail

each ancient mango tree marks an old grave

so each sweet fruit is memory of a slave

The road away from Serfdom

JOHN MAXWELL Sunday, November 02, 2008

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NAUGHT FOR THEIR COMFORT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But hunger is a great teacher.

Copyright©2008 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

herding in the tropics

a sudden torrent washes out the road

my father speaks of an all-island rain

as little lakes expand across the plain

wet cattle move but slowly with a goad

thick mud resists and does not answer pain

a sudden torrent washes out the road

no one has told me how to read this code

nor how to hold a calm and even strain

in this wet season norms have turned arcane

a sudden torrent washes out the road

Election 2008

On Tuesday, November 4, American voters will be asked to make a choice unprecedented since 1932: between the politics of convention and the politics of hope. We are on the brink of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, and sliding rapidly into the abyss. The entire Western world is economically overstretched, in large part because of the profligate policies followed by George W. Bush and those around him. The United States is mired in two wars in Asia, neither of which has a simple end-point visible in the near future.

Over the past eight years, the United States has been governed by a cabal – there is no other word for it – that has wasted the seed-corn. It has ignored good science, it has devastated the good-will built up by its predecessor administration, it has elevated bigotry over common sense, ideology over reality, loyalty over decency.  Senator McCain, for all of his sudden conversion to populism, promises nothing different. In fact, in his embrace of the know-nothing ideologism represented by the winking, smirking governor of Alaska, he promises the same policies in a skirt and a Vera Wang leather jacket.

A man who cannot tell the difference between a Zeiss planetarium projector and an overhead projector, whose response to economic crisis is empty gimmickry and gimcrack phraseology does not have the skill or the sense to lead the United States, or the world (which is the job of the president of the United States, after all) in these critical times.

Barack Obama has faced the stormiest electoral campaign of recent times with calm and humour. He has demonstrated, time and again, real understanding of the world, wisdom and humour. His message is hope. It is time for change from the politics of oligarchy, dishonesty, and greed. If you live and vote in the United States, Barack Obama is the only sane choice for president.

not truly warm

the sun tells quite a story but it lies

if you think it is warm then you're a dope

autumn is pleasant only to the eyes

there are so many things we must advise

that you should follow since you have to cope

the sun tells quite a story but it lies

each of our choices this we must surmise

has led you to the very end of rope

autumn is pleasant only to the eyes

thus you have seen the old year as it dies

winter is coming and there's time to mope

the sun tells quite a story but it lies

white clouds against the pale blue of these skies

urge us just to give up and to elope

autumn is pleasant only to the eyes

someone might speak of harvest as the prize

of fruit and seed and coming spring of hope

the sun tells quite a story but it lies

autumn is pleasant only to the eyes