17 April 2005

Let Them Eat Statistics

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It is easy to laugh at our parliamentarians, throwing their packaged visions of capitalist perfection at each other across the floor of the House of Representatives. Last week, as is customary, when the minister of finance opened the Budget Debate, the pillow fight became quite rowdy, and the learned minister was forced to confess that he didn't know what economic harmonisation meant.

Now, if his opponents had been speaking algebra, the language of economists, he would have known. For the present generation of parliamentary economic experts, any bright new buzzword immediately becomes a war cry if published in TIME, and a policy if published in Forbes. People who can't run their own businesses can tell the world how to run the country.

Problem is, the country is not listening. Parliament appears to have lost the attention of most Jamaicans. Gone are the days when the finance minister's speech was reprinted verbatim in the Gleaner and pored over in the boardrooms of banks and other important institutions.

Today, all that is important is the Reverse Repo rate and the level of NIR, whatever those mean to the ordinary man.
I never imagined 30 years ago when I was fighting to establish a National Minimum Wage that domestic helpers would be called upon to pay income tax so soon.

The fact that many now are liable is not a function of development, rather the reverse. The income tax on those at the bottom of the economic ladder demonstrates how depraved the idea of economic development has become.

The finance minister, Dr Davies, almost apologised for not being brave enough to introduce at once the 'tax reforms' recommended by the Matalon Committee - a bunch of brand new capitalist proposals that could have been written, one imagines, by Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham if those two dead heroes had not cared as much as they did for the welfare of the poorest.

An increase in the General Consumption Tax - already at a ferocious 15 per cent - is to go up by a point. Our neoliberal experts regard such a tax as eminently fair, since everyone is equally affected.

It is quite equitable, considering that both Mr Matalon and the man who washes his car windows at the stoplights are equally prohibited from stealing bread.

The law is unambiguous. The problem the neoliberals don't recognise is that in a society in which most people are barely above subsistence level, consumption and income are almost precisely the same; so that a tax which arbitrarily removes 15 per cent of one's earnings is much more onerous to someone who earns the minimum wage and consumes all of it, while company directors may earn $20 million and consume only a fraction of that in order to keep themselves alive.

To the woman at subsistence level, buying an inhaler for her asthmatic child is an expensive luxury which she must afford if her child is to remain alive. That means that for a few days, her children may have to do with sugar and water and a crust of bread.

Prisoners of the state are better fed. In Jamaica, as in the United States, the gap between rich and poor is a gulf as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. And, in pursuit of the same goal of "Wealth", both governments are increasingly pauperising their working people. They claim the playing-field is level, but it is as level as a ski jump.

While the Government claims that at 12 per cent inflation is under control, one wonders whose control? Inflation is not necessarily evil - if everything is subject to its influence. The problem is that in this age of 'labour market reform' and industrialisation by Free Zone, the workers' wages are pegged to some notional standard, made like almost everything else these days, in China.

The minister of finance was proud that Jamaica had got out from under the IMF, claiming, quite correctly, that he is a good friend of the former consigliere at that institution, Stanley Fischer. If Dr Davies and Mr Fischer are friends - and they are - it can only be because Dr Davies has been following the IMF prescriptions without having been forced to do so.

Dr Davies speaks about the one-size-fits-all approach of the IMF - a description he would have indignantly rejected when used by people like me 12 years ago. In essence, Dr Davies now finds himself in a Procrustean bed of his own making, unable to direct the economic affairs of his country because the foreign capitalists who own him will not allow him any freedom. Of course, some foreign capitalists are also local capitalists - the banks, for instance.

Dr Davies can talk all he wants about reducing interest rates; in the boardrooms, the real owners laugh indulgently: "Let Omar have his little fun," they might say. Dr Davies regards as a signal achievement his lowering of the interest rate on student loans from the usurious 22 per cent to a merely oppressive 16 per cent. Big deal!

American television advertises interest rates half that for people with imperfect credit ratings who want to refinance their mortgages. They pay less than the Government and the people of Jamaica do for the pleasure of living the external version of the American Nightmare.

Why does it surprise anyone that nearly 80 per cent of Jamaican university graduates are living in foreign countries? If you have to pay J$1,024,000 a year for medical school and a fifth of that for interest to the Students Loan Bureau, how can you afford to treat the ordinary Jamaican sufferer?

The common or garden UWI Arts graduate is snapped up by the New York public school system and is able to buy a car within weeks of graduating from the UWI. No doubt the same is true of graduates from UTech and NCU. But WE are going to double the number of university places in a very short time, no doubt to provide more cannon fodder for Mr Bush.

There is one silver lining to this thundercloud, however; it is that Jamaicans abroad are now the largest source of real foreign exchange to this economy, and they are the real reason that this society is still, more or less, in one piece.

One imagines that Dr Davies and his colleagues are literate enough to have read some of the publications of the World Bank, such as those I mentioned last week. If they had read those or any number of others, they would have seen that education is the single most important motive force in development.

The problem is, of course, that development as seen by our experts are movements in the Gross National Product rather than improvement in the quality of life.

In 1999, when young Elian Gonzales and his father were both in the United States, the father was offered millions of dollars and all sorts of deals if he would decide to permanently reside in the land of the free and home of the brave.

Mr Gonzales was, at that time in the US, remember, well out of the reach of the Cuban Government. Vice-President Gore, Secretary of State Albright and Attorney-General Reno were ready to provide him with any protection necessary if only he would say 'YES'.

Yet, faced by the formidable array of the US Government, the American Press, the Cuban community in the US and the prospect of a life in God's Own Country as a rich man, the Cuban security guard said 'NO'. He wished to return to his home and his job and his friends in Cuba.

Cuba's presumed GNP is much lower than Jamaica's, about one half, if I read the statistics correctly. Yet their quality of life, according to JLP anti-communist visitors over the last few years, is way ahead of Jamaica's. Violent crime is almost non-existent, the medical services and education are excellent and so on.

In the calculus of human development it is the Cubans who are ahead of us, while we talk about achieving three per cent growth. Cuba, with about three times our population, will be opening in the next few years 1,200 art schools.

In any given year, the Cubans graduate more doctors than the UWI has graduated in its entire existence, and three quarters of the Cuban population is involved in some course of study. Jamaica is one of more than 50 countries to which Cuba lends doctors, engineers and teachers.

There are Cubans teaching now in Jamaican primary schools and 10,000 of them in Venezuela. In Haiti, to which we with our superior GNP can't send one agricultural expert, the Cubans have nearly 1,000 doctors and other medical and educational workers.

So, I salute the Cuban ambassador when she refutes the crude propaganda of the US Embassy here about Cuba's human rights record. I would like to ask the US to tell me how many people are in jail in Cuba and how many in the US.

I must say I haven't heard of the Cubans locking up lawyers for the crime of defending their clients, nor have I heard of any establishment in Cuba which tortures prisoners, except for one run by the US Government in the illegally-occupied Guantanamo Bay.

Meanwhile, we take our lessons from the United States with the result that hundreds of poor black youths are busily exterminating themselves and other Jamaicans because they have no reason to feel that they are worth anything.

A few years ago, I quoted some Jamaican research which reported that 16 per cent of teenagers in St Ann felt so bad about their prospects that they had either contemplated or attempted putting an end to their lives. Had they been in Kingston or Spanish Town they might have found other means of expressing their frustrations - by killing other people.

It is useful to remember that the Jamaican GNP showed an uptick when Diageo bought out the Desnoes and Geddes interests in D&G, although production did not increase as a result. GNP showed a similar uptick when Nestlé bought out Royal Cremo. Red Stripe is still here, but Cremo's Buckingham ice-cream sold in Jamaican shops is imported from the Dominican Republic.

Meanwhile, we don't pay our teachers enough to keep them in Jamaica or to attract male teachers into schools. We can't keep the boys in school when we do manage to get them there.

Communities are atomised in the interest of the Net International Reserves; families are devastated by unemployment and HIV/AIDS, businesses and farms destroyed by interest rates.

And we import ice-cream from the Dominican Republic, sorrel from Trinidad and tomatoes from the United States. The first tomatoes ever seen in the US came from Jamaica.
Happy Birthday, Mr Patterson!

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