Maxwell's House

The Divine Right of Certain 'Ginnigogs'

2005-12-25T11:00:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

About 35 years ago, having returned to Jamaica after my five-year exile in Britain, I was struck by a particularly poignant story. It had happened on the other side of the block of buildings where I used to work for the BBC, at India House, in Holborn behind Bush House in the Strand.

The high commission had been taken over by militants, Sikhs, if I remember correctly, and everyone inside the embassy was a hostage. The siege was broken when a sharpshooter from Scotland Yard killed one of the terrorists.

The sharpshooter had to be taken to hospital to be treated for shock. He had done the job he was trained to do. But he was a civilised human being, and the idea of killing another person was too much for him. I have always wondered what became of him.

It was Goethe apparently, who warned us to "beware of those in whom the urge to punish is powerful". That English policeman was not one of those, and though I may never meet him, he is a friend.

There are others, nearer home, who I could not consider friends and of whom I beware, because they have a lust for punishment. They know better than anyone else who is a sinner, a criminal, who deserves punishment, and they are ready to mete out that punishment.

Immediately after having been acquitted of murder in the Kingston Circuit Court on Tuesday, Senior Superintendent of Police Mr Reneto deCordova (etc) Adams delivered himself of a few choice words, among them:

"Those [criminals] who returned from England, Canada, America and the Caribbean, or, from everywhere, since we have left the streets - talking about they have returned to take over the streets, I am imploring them, beseeching them to return whence they came, because so it was in the beginning so shall it be in the end.

"My men and I will continue where we left off: and that is in the protection of the Jamaican people against criminal elements. The only difference now is our resolve will be multiplied tenfold."

I don't know if Mr Adams frightens the criminals. He certainly frightens me.

Especially since his large and vociferous regiment of supporters are calling the talk shows, baying for blood. Adams must be let loose they say, to 'deal with the criminals', as if Mr Adams is a one man war against crime whose mere presence on the streets renders the Commissioner of Police and the rest of the police force, as well as the Minister of National Security, redundant and surplus to requirements.

Clearly, Mr Adams believes that he is entitled to make policy on behalf of the 'forces of law and order'.

There is just one small difficulty. There is a man named Lucius Thomas who seems to be under the impression that he is the Commissioner of Police. He doesn't seem to heed Mr Adams and insisted on Wednesday that Mr Adams and his co-accused would not be reinstated into the Jamaica Constabulary Force until they had undergone a period of counselling and psychological testing, mandated by JCF policy.

Mr Adams and his men have in just two incidents, killed nearly a dozen people, none of whom the police would say were 'known' to them. In the latest incident four people were killed in the course of a shootout with the police.

Two of them were women, and a little girl who was in the house when the police first arrived, testified that the women were alive when the police got there and that she, the little girl, was ripped from the arms of one of them and taken outside while the 'shoot-out' proceeded.

No gunpowder residue was found on the hands of the dead people which suggests that they had not fired at the police or at anyone else. Another witness, a policeman told a story of being directed by Supt Adams to go to a certain address in Kingston and pick up something for him. This turned out to be a firearm which was, according to the police witness, then planted at the scene of the 'shootout'.

I do not intend to go into the details of the case, or to discuss the Chief Justice's summation of the evidence and his directions to the jury, nor even to question his apparent displeasure at Dr Carolyn Gomes, head of Jamaicans For Justice. The CJ accused her of gesturing, indicating disagreement with something he had said. Dr Gomes claims she was simply taking notes.

I cannot say the Chief Justice was wrong; I was not there; for all I know Dr Gomes was making 'monkey faces' in court. Except that anyone who knows her (and her husband is one of my doctors) would find it hard to believe that she could have been foolish enough to signal her disapproval of the Chief Justice in any way in his court. His outburst, and it was an outburst, seemed peevish and personal and has probably given even more licence to those who believe that human rights activists are on the side of criminals.

"And these criminal rights organisations are trying to stop me from doing my job while these hoodlums continue to destroy the only livelihood that we have. I will not allow criminals to take over our island, Jamaica."

According to an item in Friday's Gleaner, from which the above is taken, those are the words of Superintendent Adams, who is apparently about to launch himself on a musical career on the dancehall circuit. He has, according to the Gleaner, made a song, entitled "To Protect and Serve", "on the Carbine Rhythm" appropriately enough, recorded two days before his murder trial began. "And SSP Adams takes no prisoners in his lyrical onslaught on crime".

The problem is that criminal intelligence depends on prisoners and informers.

Dead men tell no tales. But, Mr Adams proposes, and Mr Adams disposes. Stand clear, the rest of you vagabonds and lowlifes!!!

I believe that any competent lawyer could find a serious case of libel and criminal libel against the SSP. He is clearly alleging that Dr Gomes and her fellow human rights campaigners are accomplices of criminals, who attempt to obstruct him in the execution of his duty.

People like me are no doubt included in SSP's rhetorical gunsights. I would be most grateful were he to vouchsafe his opinion of me and others of my ilk.

As one who has been writing for more than 40 years about Jamaican police brutality and the impunity which they enjoy, I commend and support Jamaicans For Justice in everything they do, because were it not for them, there are odious crimes which would otherwise have gone unexamined in this country. Even if they are not punished, ventilating them is important.

The case of Michael Gayle, beaten to death by a state security cordon, is one such.

We are inhabitants of a country which still has an umbilical connection to slavery and its mores, when the proper punishment for anything was a flogging, or for more serious offences, death. We still believe in brutalising offenders, thereby guaranteeing that they will become even worse offenders. We neglect our children, and betray our working class who are all potential criminals.

And, as the people of the ghetto told a university investigating team 10 years ago, they know how they are seen. In a column I wrote in May 1996, discussing what the people told the UWI investigators, I reported:

"The police are universally seen as brutalising the youth, provoking more violence, the people say.

To the youth in one area it seems the police are 'trained' to think that everyone in the community is bad. Regardless of your age or sex they diss you everyday. Even if you show your work ID they tell you that you work in the days to buy bullet to kill at night.

'Dey handle we like we a prisoner.'

The police are suspected to be in cahoots with criminals, selling them guns, giving away 'nformers' and 'living on' those they know sell ganja. Some police are described as lazy, ineffectual and unpredictable. In some areas they do little about many crimes and/or instances of domestic violence.

One community reported that the police tied a youth to a tree for 'target practice' and only the screams of his mother saved him. The police, 'hooligans with legal power', refer to one area as 'bird bush', where they go hunting. To chat on a 'corner' is to invite violent attention from the cops, even if you are shirtless and clearly unarmed."

Mr Adams needs to read that report. It is called: "They Cry Respect'! Urban Violence and Poverty in Jamaica" and if I had the money, I would buy 10,000 of them to distribute to every policeman and woman in Jamaica.

Justice, Where?

If justice is done, it should be manifestly be seen to be done. It may have been justice which freed the policemen, but justice is not satisfied by that verdict. The civil rights of four dead people would appear to have been abrogated by the police, whether by accident or design.

I personally do not believe the police story, given in unsworn testimony which meant that they could not be cross-examined. The jury believed them, and the jury were far better placed than I, to judge. The jury however, did not have the opportunity of hearing from Mr Danhai Williams, from whose premises the allegedly planted gun was sourced. His absence from court seems to have passed without any censure from the Chief Justice or any other officer of the law.

Curious. Especially since his statements outside of court appeared to back up the story of the policeman who said the gun was planted.

I would not allow this matter to rest where it is. I would expect the Attorney-General to order an inquiry, even at this stage, to determine whether, even if the police did not murder these people, they may have unlawfully deprived them of their constitutional rights as human beings and citizens of Jamaica.

I would also advise the relatives of the deceased to launch some suits in the Constitutional Court, to get justice for the dead, even if it won't do them any good.

This case, like the case of the Braeton Seven, leaves a stink in the nostrils of a great many Jamaicans, and it will not be banished by the loudest protestations and flagwaving of Mr Adams and his claque (correct) .

Oliver Twist in Hong Kong

2005-12-18T23:50:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

On Friday morning, as I write, the Leviathan called Globalisation seems headed for the rocks in Hong Kong. Stark failure faces the Doha round of negotiations for a new world order in which imperialist capitalism would adopt a new persona - a kinder, gentler face disguising the same old rapacious exploitation of the poor of the world.

Masked protesters from the Philippines lead other protesters in marching towards the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in continuing protest Friday Dec 16, 2005 against the 6th WTO Ministerial Conference in this former British colony. The activists have been holding daily protests against WTO's trade liberalisation. (Photo: AP)

Among the rocks in Globalisation's seaway are the newly awakened giants of the Third World or so-called Developing World - India, Brazil and others, as well as - Surprise! Surprise!! - the primary producers of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP), former colonies of metropolitan Europe. Marooned in their miserable alms houses, these minor mendicants are saying to the rich masters "Please, Sir, we want more!"

The masters of the alms houses, the Americans, Europeans, Japanese and other members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are bemused by these demands, not quite understanding what the little beggars want when they say they are demanding justice.

Absent from the global forum are the Haitians, the people who began the whole process of decolonisation and freedom from plantation slavery. And that is where the apparently intractable quarrel about economic justice began between the rich and the poor of the world.

The Haitian revolution began a 200-year-long process of decolonisation which is ending, as it began, with the Haitians struggling to free themselves from slavery. They were not defeated by force of arms but by compound interest; to escape the French and American trade embargo of their newly independent country, the Haitians agreed to pay the French reparations for their war of Independence.

In neighbouring Jamaica, the planters were recompensed for losing their property when slavery was abolished. Nothing was paid to the ex-slaves, guaranteeing, as in Haiti, the continuing supremacy of the usurers and the shopkeepers. Haiti was the first highly indebted poor country, having to pay the French a penalty estimated by President Aristide to equal US$25,000,000,000 in today's money.

When the Haitians defeated two of Napoleon's armies, a British army and the remnants of the Spanish army in San Domingue, they began a process of exporting revolution and freedom, a process for which they have never been forgiven. It was the Haitians who armed and dispatched Simon Bolivar on his final and successful mission to free Latin America from Spanish rule.

Although slavery was not abolished in Brazil and the United States for another half century, and Cuba did not gain its full independence for another century-and-a-half, Haiti began the process which finally transformed piracy and the plantation economy into the system known today as capitalism. The plantation economy is moribund - not quite dead.

It survives in severely truncated form - as a paraplegic and dysfunctional system in the ACP countries.

There, in Jamaica and other places, its traditions remain strong: social dysfunctions, including seasonal unemployment, economic emigration, social stratification and the stranglehold of elites on primitive economies. In these economies, political parties which claim to represent the masses enjoy the fruits of office while the elites enjoy the much richer perquisites of economic power.

In these economies, it is the commission agents and the shopkeepers who are in power, expressing their displeasure with mass movements by withdrawing their confidence and their bank accounts from time to time to enforce 'fiscal discipline' and usurious rates of unearned rent - income from 'government paper' issued by the representatives of the wealth creators for the greater good of the wealth consumers.

Reparative Justice?

The helplessness and intellectual bankruptcy of the plantation economies is nowhere better expressed than in last Thursday's speech in Hong Kong by Jamaica's minister of foreign affairs, the Hon K D Knight, QC.

According to this newspaper on Friday, Mr Knight told the Ministerial Meeting of the WTO that the deliberations would only be successful "to the extent that there was a discernible movement on the development agenda". This, according to Mr Knight, meant:

The promotion of the productive sectors through trade;
The sustained development of the commodity sector;
Building supply capacity and competitiveness and increasing market access for developing countries in the areas of exports, including agriculture, commodities, apparel and labour and resource intensive manufactures and services.

Which, being interpreted, means: "Give us a 'bly' enabling us to build more free zones, dig bigger and more destructive holes in the landscape and have enough left over for food stamps." The argument over Universal Human Rights and Justice which began in Haiti 201 years ago is now subsumed into a piteous cry for bigger, better, kindlier and gentler alms houses.

The Third World are asking, like Bustamante in 1944 in Jamaica, for a 'lickle more bread and a lickle butter'. There are some others who are asking for an entirely different menu, for what some describe as a 'preposterous' demand for reparations, compensation for the injuries and injustices of the last five centuries. Their argument is that just as the Germans had to recompense the Jews for the injuries inflicted on them and their fellows by Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich, so should the Americans, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Belgians pay for their depredations in Africa and the New World.

These depredations continued after slavery and continue to this day, as the Europeans, made rich by their exploitation, have maximised and entrenched their extortion of wealth by new profit-making systems in the form of tariffs, protectionism, quotas and, most of all, unfair terms of trade and ruinous interest rates.

These systems in turn, finance a wealth distributive system in subsidies and social services which keep the metropolitan working classes out of political and trade union mischief.

What Mr Knight and his Third World backers want is that the rich recognise that we too, have domestic constituencies to be mollified. The unspoken rider to this argument is 'Hey! food stamps are insurance against civil unrest and a lot cheaper than an expeditionary force'.

Meanwhile, the colonial elites, amassing new fortunes by the week, don't put their money where their mouths are - their funds are in Cayman, Nassau, Bermuda, Liechtenstein and Jersey.

From there, the money which could be invested in Jamaican enterprise, becomes part of the immense fund of Foreign Direct Investment which is channelled by the global casino bosses into China, Taiwan and other places whose ministers are never tired of echoing the European masters' preachments that we are poor because we are poor and/or shiftless, or socialist, or corrupt or simply stupid.

In the 1970s, as part of the many short, sharp shocks administered by the international financial institutions (IFI), we were told we could not subsidise our farmers or our poor. Subsidies distorted the market. Our subsidies, instead, were added to the subsidies paid to American agro-industry and European farmers. It makes sound economic sense to subsidise the millionaire Fanjuls in Florida sugar or market colossi like Archer Daniels, Monsanto, Chiquita (ex-United Fruit), Boeing and Microsoft.

The British are refusing to give up their £8,000,000,000 annual subsidy from Europe and the French will fight to the death to retain their even larger dole from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.

The electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) of the IFIs works no better on countries than it did on the mentally ill in 'asylums'. Nor does the intellectual and emotional lobotomisation of whole generations of political leaders. We now have leaders whose mental processes have been surgically separated from their cultural roots, but out in the grassroots, crazy people still speak of socialism and absurd concepts such as the greatest good for the greatest number.

Paradoxically, political ECT may yet prove beneficial; if only we could persuade the rich and powerful to behave as brutally as their perceived self-interest tells them.

Nothing would be better for us than a Cuban-style embargo, forcing us to think for ourselves, forcing us to look to our real resources, in our cultures, our imaginations, our ingenuity, our people.

We prattle about agro-industry, forgetting that sugar was the original and most deadly of all agro-industry. Mr Kinght's prescriptions lead to an intellectual, economic and cultural dead end. If we were to wake up and realise that if we stopped paying extortionate interest - exporting barrels of money to Cayman, Bermuda, and similar ratholes - we would immediately triple the amount at the disposal of the government; we would understand that salvation is in our own hands and not in the hands of the successors to Enron, or the psalm-singers of Microsoft or the cooing doves of Citibank, Standard & Poors and the US State Department.

If the people of Jamaica were to understand that the government of Jamaica exports twice as much of their own hard-earned money to develop foreign capitalism as it spends on developing Jamaica, things would soon change. And we would not have to repatriate Haitians running away from tyranny.

Democracy and Development

The US-written Master Narrative of Cuba is so pervasive that most of us find it almost impossible to imagine what life could be like in "Communist Cuba". There are some fascinating snippets in the news about the fates of the people of New Orleans which was devastated three months ago by Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans, a city of 600,000 people, was devastated because safety precautions which were known to be necessary were never taken. The levees (dikes) which should have prevented most of the storm surge failed and thousands of people were left homeless and jobless. The dikes should have been strengthened years ago.

Further, the emergency management systems failed, mostly because of incompetence and malign neglect. The result is that most of the hurricane refugees are still scattered to the four winds, some as far away as Alaska, and the culture of the most cosmopolitan city in the US has been scattered with them.

One harrowing story in the December 8 New York Times (NYT) tells of Tracy Jackson and Jerel Brown and their four young children who "share a twin bed and thin mattress on the floor [in] the 14th place they have laid their heads since Hurricane Katrina struck just over 14 weeks ago."

As the NYT says: "The immediate aftermath of the hurricane exposed the deep divide between New Orleans's haves and have-nots, as middle-class families rushed to hotels while the poorest of the poor suffered in the squalor of the Superdome.

"The chasm remains, more than three months later. the Jackson-Browns, who are not married and lack high school diplomas, credit cards, even driver's licenses, are among the legions of desperately destitute still lost and in limbo."

Three days later, the NYT said in an editorial: "We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

"We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans". But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles." (NYT Dec 11).

If a civilisation is to be judged by the care it takes of its most helpless, it may be instructive to compare the situation in Cuba. Although Cuba has been visited by many more and more violent hurricanes than the US, fewer than two dozen Cubans have been lost to hurricanes in the last five years.

In Cuba, the entire country is organised to protect and preserve life and community. The neighbourhood Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) are in fact organisations for community preservation. Every Cuban knows what to do and where to go and the CDRs make sure that no one is left behind, neither man, woman, child, nor domestic pet nor farm animal.

Cuba is even poorer than Jamaica in the IFIs' economic estimation. That the Cubans can do better than the United States at protecting their people is an amazing and perhaps incendiary fact. As you can see, I have refrained from commenting on these facts. Nevertheless, I am certain that merely revealing them is likely to cause me no end of trouble.

A Maiming of the Soul

2005-12-11T00:00:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It is hard to feel sorry for a woman who has a supertanker named after her, a woman whose IQ is probably nearly twice as high as most of the men she works with, a woman who if she wanted to change jobs would probably be offered three or four times what she is paid as the second most important official in the US Government.

It is really hard to be sorry for Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state. Last week I felt sorry for her. I was looking at a photograph of Dr Rice and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, taken by the AP's Markus Schreiber at a media briefing in Berlin on Tuesday.

Dr Rice had a hunted look; the face of one cornered, surrounded by enemies, with no place to hide, no way to turn. Frau Merkel just looks terribly sad.

They were surrounded only by journalists, who these days are among the most toothless and harmless alleged predators anywhere. Dr Rice's face reflected an entirely different reality: she was trapped, cornered and hunted by the lies of the Bush administration about its treatment of 'unlawful combatants' or 'battlefield detainees' hidden and tortured in dozens of black holes round the world.

We've known about them and their treatment for a long time. On January 19, 2002, before the start of the Iraq War, I wrote: "The American prisoners of war, or, as they call them, 'battlefield detainees' are causing a great deal of trouble for the United States. A large number of people round the world are repulsed and horrified by the treatment meted out to these men, even if, as the Americans claim, they are 'the most dangerous folks in the world'.

"To sedate them on their flights, or to put hoods over their heads and surgical masks over their faces, to shave them and put them in solitary confinement on a concrete floor surrounded by barbed wire may be, of course, some people's idea of a Caribbean vacation.

"Mr Donald Rumsfeld, that macho symbol of American resolve, says he does not greatly care how the men are treated, although, as their official captor, he is accountable under the rules of war. And the attorney-general of the United States, Mr Ashcroft, the principal lawman for the United States of America, says he doesn't think that the men 'deserve basic constitutional protection'. They are, according to him, 'war criminals'.

"In the words of General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these most dangerous 'folks' are ready, to chew their way through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 plane, to bring it down. And no doubt, they are capable of levitation, of causing ball lightning and turning people to stone with their basilisk's eyes."

Three years later, I see nothing to retract in that judgment. The US administration never regarded their 'battlefield detainees' as human beings - which is why the administration has now found itself trapped in a semantic and moral maze, leaving it to Dr Rice with her formidable intellect, to convince the world that the United States does not torture its captives despite the enormity of the evidence to the contrary.

According to the Associated Press on May 3, 2003, Dr Rice's predecessor as secretary of state had, "In a strongly worded letter, urged Pentagon officials to move faster in determining which prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay can be released".

Even then, shortly after the start of the Iraq invasion, the former soldier was obviously worried about the developing scandal, part of which was the disclosure that children as young as 13 were being held at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay.

According to the US News & World Report that week, "Citing complaints from eight allies whose citizens are among the prisoners, Powell said in the letter that mishandling the detainees undermines efforts to win international co-operation in the war on terror".

In the same story, the AP reported that "Rumsfeld has said the prisoners were being interrogated for any information they had on planned terrorist activities. they would continue to be held indefinitely until it is determined they pose no threat and until interrogators were convinced they had no more useful intelligence to offer".

Long-Range Planners

Al-Qaeda are reputed to be long-range planners, but can anyone believe that any of the detainees who have been in durance vile for two and three years have any plans to disgorge? Yet, the stories coming out of Guantanamo Bay and other places reveal that the torture continues, inexorably, with no end in sight. Occasionally the US releases people who are clearly innocent.

Their stories are heartbreaking. They do not know what is wanted of them, their inquisitors go over the same questions day after day, week after week, month after month. They are humiliated, degraded, treated as less than human. The lucky ones have killed themselves.

After the Korean War, Americans should understand better than anyone that many people can be brainwashed, but many can never be broken. The story I related last week, of Fidel Castro's comrade in arms, Abel Santamaria, proves the point.

The behaviour of Haydee Santamaria, his sister, only makes it more forcefully. In a jail cell, presented with her brother's bleeding eye, torn from his living body, Haydee was told, "This eye belonged to your brother. If you will not tell us what he refused to say, we will tear out the other".

She, who loved her brave brother above all other things, replied with dignity, "If you tore out his eye and he did not speak, neither will I".

Torture does not work. Most of the information gleaned from it is untrustworthy. Those who cannot stand the pain will tell the inquisitors whatever they think they want to hear.

So, can anyone believe that information-gathering is the real purpose of torture? The original inquisitors did not think so. They put their victims "to the test" knowing perfectly well that there was no information to be gained. But they tortured and burnt their victims for the greater glory of God and their own perverse and pathological satisfactions.

It is clear that Dr Rice's torture explanations have satisfied no one. The European foreign ministers, having embarrassed the US to the point where Dr Rice apparently promised no more torture, no more renditions, chalked up a victory.

Their constituents, however, continue to be incensed by the behaviour of the United States and will continue to complain as more horror stories come to light. Last week, as Dr Rice was speaking to the Europeans, a man called Khaled al-Masri was speaking by satellite link-up to a news conference in Washington.

Mr al-Masri is a German citizen of Lebanese origin. On holiday in Macedonia, he was kidnapped and handed over to Americans. He was taken to a prison in Afghanistan where he was held incommunicado for five months and tortured. He was also sodomised by his jailers.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Mr al-Masri is suing the Central Intelligence Agency and its former head, George Tenet, and the US government. The ACLU says this is the first case to challenge the kidnapping of foreign nationals for 'interrogations' in secret prisons in third countries.

The German Chancellor, Frau Merkel, brought the case to the attention of Dr Rice on Tuesday. According to Merkel, "The US government has, of course, accepted the case as a mistake". Who told her to say that?

Dr Rice's spokesmen denied that the secretary had accepted al-Masri's case as a mistake; Dr Rice had said only that "Any policy will sometimes result in errors, and when it happens we will do everything to rectify it".

That's odd, because Mr al-Masri was denied entry to the US last weekend when he arrived in Atlanta. If the US is serious about correcting mistakes, that was not a promising start. But perhaps it was all due to an error in interpretation - except that Frau Merkel speaks excellent English.

Values we Share?

Four years ago, shortly after 9/11 I was one of those who counselled the US not to allow anger to distort judgment. "In all the millions of words about Tuesday's horrific tragedy, few have been used to ask Why? to seek the real reasons. Blasting the visible manifestations of a cancer may achieve cosmetic improvement, but the concealed body of the parasitic tumour will not disappear.

"Injustice is the most eloquent recruiter for terrorism. Injustice breeds desperation. Suicidal behaviour is almost always a desperate call for help. People who are willing to destroy themselves along with randomly selected groups of innocents are speaking the language of violence, which they know their enemies understand. Unfortunately, while their enemies understand the language, they do not usually listen to the message."

But Mr Bush was adamant: "Remember. the ones in Guantanamo Bay are killers. They don't share the same values we share" (March 20, 2002).

There was angry and learned dissent, of course. One of the most eloquent came from one of Britain's most senior judges: "The purpose of holding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was, and is, to put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts and at the mercy of victors.

"As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice," Lord Steyn said.

Lord Steyn said it was a recurring theme in history "that in times of war, armed conflict, or perceived national danger, even liberal democracies adopt measures infringing human rights in ways that are wholly disproportionate to the crisis. Often the loss of liberty is permanent" (November 26, 2003).

"The question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay complies with the minimum international standards for the conduct of fair trials," Lord Steyn continued. "The answer can be given quite shortly. It is a resounding 'no'. Prisoners at the Camp Delta base on Cuba are being held in conditions of 'utter lawlessness'."

That verdict was reinforced last week by some of the most learned and respected judges in the world, the British House of Lords, sitting as the Supreme Court of the UK. In a judgment delivered on Thursday, the seven Law Lords denounced torture and any attempt to use evidence obtained by torture in British courts.

Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the former Lord Chief Justice who chaired the panel, said English law had regarded torture and its fruits with abhorrence for more than 500 years. "The principles of the common law, standing alone, in my opinion compel the exclusion of third-party torture evidence as unreliable, unfair, offensive to ordinary standards of humanity and decency and incompatible with the principles which should animate a tribunal seeking to administer justice."

Lord Hoffman: "The use of torture is dishonourable .It corrupts and degrades the state which uses it and the legal system which accepts it. In our own century, many people in the United States have felt their country dishonoured by its use of torture outside the jurisdiction and its practice of extra-legal 'rendition' of suspects to countries where they would be tortured."

Lord Hope: "Torture [is] one of the most evil practices known to man. practices authorised for use in Guantanamo Bay would shock the conscience if they were ever to be authorised for use in our own country."

Lord Rodger: The torturer is abhorred "not because the information he produces may be unreliable but because of the barbaric means he uses to extract it".

Lord Nicholls: "Torture is not acceptable. No civilised society condones its use. This is a bedrock moral principle in this country. For centuries the common law has set its face against torture."

Lord Brown: "Torture is an unqualified evil. It can never be justified. Rather, it must always be punished."

History Will Absolve Fidel

2005-12-04T21:15:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

On my way to Panama last week, I had the theoretical options of going by way of Miami or through Cuba. Obeying my instincts and listening to my intelligence, I decided more than a year ago that my life could do without my tempting fate and the PATRIOT Act. I would no longer apply for a visa to visit the US. 'Coward man keep soun' bone', as the Jamaican aphorism says.

Since the Cubans prefer Canadian dollars to US currency, I decided to change some US dollars at the airport cambio. The lady in charge asked me for my passport, I supposed to ascertain that I was who I said I was. But there was more. She scanned my passport into a machine and then phoned someone.

I presumed that my name had come up on some list connected with my passport. I asked her if she scanned every passport to change $100. She didn't answer, nor did she answer when I asked her whether the joint was run by the CIA.

When I was leaving Panama to return to Jamaica my passport again occasioned surprise at the COPA airline check in. The matter was, however, resolved without my ever knowing what was at issue. I may be paranoid, but as Henry Kissinger once quoted, "even paranoiacs have enemies".

I say this because I would be a fool not to know that I am in some circles considered if not an enemy of the United States, at least unqualified to be embedded with the Marines. I have known this for years, in fact, for nearly 40 years. American paranoia is not a product of the Bush administration. It has almost always been there.

I mention all this because of the relative ease with which it is possible to defame people, particularly in Third World politics with the enthusiastic participation of the United States press.

While they demonise Aristide, Castro and Chavez, for instance, they say very little about terrorists like Posada Carriles and his protector and co-conspirator Santiago Alvarez (not the filmmaker). The Master Narrative, as Tom Blivens calls it, omits the context.

There was precious little coverage in the US last week of the arrest of the wealthy developer, Santiago Alvarez in Miami. Apart from the Miami Herald and a few small town newspapers, nobody else seemed interested although the Herald reported: "The case against Posada's close associates has the potential to create a political firestorm for the White House, with hardline exile activists vowing to protest and defend Alvarez against what they see as an attack by Castro."

This is because Alvarez is a prominent supporter of Jeb Bush and is also accused of ferrying the airplane bomber Posada illegally into the United States and giving him shelter once there.

According to the Herald, the the Cuban community in Miami is incensed, saying that President Bush is catering to Castro by arresting a man who they regard as a freedom fighter, but who is a terrorist by any other definition.

The Cuban government has on tape a conversation between Santiago Alvarez and one of his agents who had been sent to conduct sabotage in Cuba. The agent asked Santiago whether he should bomb the world famous Tropicana night-club and Santiago replied, "It's OK with me."

Mr Alvarez also has been accused by Cuba of organising a 2001 'mission' in which three Miami-Dade men were captured trying to land in Cuba with assault rifles.

He is also suspected of being Posada's backer in the expedition to Panama in 2001 in which Posada intended to bomb an auditorium with hundreds of people come to listen to Fidel Castro. "We are seeing signals that indicate that the administration of President Bush is forgetting the promises they made to the exile community in order to cater to Castro,'' said Cuban American National Foundation President Francisco ''Pepe'' Hernandez according to the Miami Herald.

Next day the Herald, valiantly straddling the fence, boldly declared that while storing assassination weaponry was against the law, 'good intentions do not excuse criminal actions: "We, too, would like to see Cubans on the island freed from a tyrant. But good intentions do not excuse criminal actions."

As it happened, on Thursday, in Jose Marti airport, I decided to reread Fidel Castro's speech in defence of the Moncada uprising in 1953. The last defiant line of the speech : "Condemn me; it does not matter. History will absolve me."

I first read the speech in 1960, on my first visit to Cuba. The air was electric. The ammunition ship, La Coubre had just been blown up by saboteurs in Havana harbour, killing hundreds - the crew, dockworkers and innocent people in their houses or at work.

The revolution was hard at work, building prefabricated houses to replace the bohios (Thatched huts) in which the farm workers and peasants lived, building new housing all over the island, providing free medical care for pregnant women of any class, and above all, wiping out illiteracy. On the day I arrived, President Eisenhower approved the end of the Cuban sugar quota. War had been declared.

I was impressed then, and am now, with the revolutionary determination to bring equality of treatment to all. Illiteracy and AIDS are almost non-existent in Cuba, there is a doctor for every 100 Cubans, the infant mortality rate is the lowest in the world and three quarters of the population are in some form of educational pursuit.

As Castro promised in his speech in 1953, every school teacher at every level in Cuba gets a sabbatical year in which to pursue any academic interest.

"History will absolve me" is, first of all, an attempt to lay the legal basis for the revolution; to rescue the Cuban people from Fulgencio Batista, a usurper, a tyrant, a man who tortured and murdered his opponents and sold Cuba's self-respect to the highest bidder, which, usually, was the Mafia or other American interests.

Castro contended that contrary to the charges against him, he was being tried for doing his duty to overthrow oppression. He then denounced the regime's response to the July 26 uprising, in which officers of the Cuban army tortured and murdered some of the men they had captured. Castro was especially bitter because he had defended the army on an earlier occasion, accusing the state of using soldiers as slaves on private estates.

He reported on the fate of his closest comrade Abel Santamaria, who had been captured alive. I have never been able to forget his description:

Frustrated by the men's courage, they tried to break the women's spirit. A sergeant with several other men came with a bleeding human eye in his hand into the cell where our comrades Melba Hernandez and Haydee Santamaria were held. Addressing the latter and showing her the eye, he said, "This eye belonged to your brother. If you will not tell us what he refused to say, we will tear out the other".

She, who loved her brave brother above all other things replied with dignity, "If you tore out his eye and he did not speak, neither will I."

Later they came back and burned their arms with cigarette stubs until at last, filled with hate, they told young Haydee Santamaria "You no longer have a boyfriend, because we killed him too."

Earlier in the speech, Fidel Castro outlined his plans for Cuba in relation to the existing situation, where more than half the land was in the hands of foreigners, while 200,000 peasant farmers did not have "a single vara of land to plant food crops for their starving children".

Except for a few foods, lumber and textile factories, Cuba was still a producer of raw materials, There were 200,000 bohios (dirt floored thatched huts) and hovels in Cuba, 400,000 families lived in slums that lacked even the most basic sanitary conveniences, 2.2 million paid extortionate rents and 2.8 million people (more than half the population) in rural and suburban Cuba lacked electricity.

He spoke about a society moved to compassion by the kidnapping of a single child, but criminally indifferent to the "mass murder" of the many thousands of children who died every year because of poverty, of fathers working only four months of the year, of a million people unemployed. In a country with five and a half-million people, more people were jobless than in France or Italy with populations nearly ten times as large.

Castro proposed revolutionary laws, first to give sovereignty back to the people, a government vested with the power to enforce the people's will and true justice, another to give non-transferrable ownership of land to tenants and subtenants, to introduce profit sharing in business and in the sugar industry, to recover stolen national property which would be then used to subsidise workers' pensions and for hospitals and other charitable work and finally a policy of revolutionary solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the continent.

Looking back at the speech today, more than fifty years, I am struck by two things: the idealism of the aims and the fact that most of those aims have in fact been achieved.

There have been mistakes made, many of them serious, but overall, if one compares Cuba to its nearest neighbours, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and jamaica, it is clear that Cubans enjoy a far better quality of life than citizens of the others. And in World Bank terms, it is poorer than all except Haiti.

For one thing, crime is almost non-existent and violent crime is statistically insignificant. People still steal and profiteer, but civil society seems alive and well in Cuba.

The care given to the weakest and most vulnerable is extraordinary and Cuban health care is recognised as among the very best in the world. The same is true of education, and just as Cubans now have a doctor in every neighbourhood (1 doctor to every 100 Cubans) they are getting university-level centres set up in every borough. And education is almost completely free.

The proportion of people completing the primary education cycle was lowest in the province of Guantanamo in 2004. It was 94%.

The highest unemployment rate in the country is in the province of Havana, where it is 2.3%. Daily food intake is over 3 kilo calories and less than 2% of the population is at risk of malnutrition. In almost every single index of human development, Cuba is far ahead of the rest of Latin America and in many cases, Cuba outperforms many developed countries, including the United States. Cuba carried out its first heart transplant nearly thirty years ago. The level of technology uis world class.

But, I am always asked, what about democracy? What about freedom of speech? Human rights? Perhaps since I am not a Cuban, it would be pretentious to even attempt to answer these questions.

I wish, however, to remind people that the United States has been engaged in what it regards as a war against Cuba for the last 46 years. The overt terrorist is clearly not over, with people like Santiago Alvarez stockpiling assassin's weapons.

When one is under attack, as the United States considers itself to be, there are restrictions on some freedoms, as in the case of the PATRIOT ACT.

But I do not believe that there are prisoners of the Cuban state who are tortured, mistreated and otherwise abused and denied fundamental human rights as are the prisoners of the American state at Guantanamo Bay, ironically, on Cuba soil where the US is illegally squatting.

And Cuba continues to be the victim of a wide range of illegal actions designed to bring down the government. We do have some answers, however, including 'refugees' from Cuba who have chosen to return to their home country. Of course, you don';t hear about them.

But we have all heard about Elian Gonzalez and his father, a security guard in Cuba. If you remember, Juan Miguel Gonzalez was offered a free mansion, millions of dollars and a life of ease if he would only renounce Cuba and relocate to the United States.

All that Cuba could have promised was more of what he was accustomed to - a life as a security guard in a country secure in its integrity and in its people.

I suspect that most Cubans would have made the same choice. I don't know too many Jamaicans who would have. And that is precisely why Castro, Chavez and Aristide are being demonised, traduced and libelled. Humanity is subversive and leaders who listen to people are extremely dangerous to the established order.

Obituary: the Late, not Great, King Sugar

2005-11-27T16:09:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The decomposing corpse of the West Indian sugar plantation system was officially certified dead on Thursday, half a century after it had ceased to show signs of life. The declaration was greeted, as such declarations generally are, by much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The 18 African/ Caribbean/Pacific countries which are most affected have lost a pillar of the slave-owning community, a system which has supported for five hundred years the dehumanisation, degradation and inhuman subjection of millions of people, mainly of African descent.

In our part of the world sugar is more than an industry. It is the living ghost of the slave system under which between 18 and 30 million people were transported across the Atlantic, their lives, families, communities and cultures destroyed, to produce wealth for capitalists in Britain, Europe and the United States. It was the acme of human parasitism.

And it has taken an unconscionably long time to die. Among the reasons for its longevity are its offspring; among them modern capitalism, the Industrial revolution, the rotary newspaper press, the steam engine, the railway, the proletarianisation and dehumanisation of millions of people in Europe and elsewhere.

And it is this which makes the plaintive bleats of the bereaved so heart rending. A man would need a heart of stone not to laugh, as somebody once said.

According to the ACP countries, the European Union's cutting of the Gordian umbilical cord last Thursday will bring in its train a host of disasters:for ACP sugar supplying states "and inevitably lead to the destruction of centuries old traditions of sugar production with devastating socio-economic consequences".

I don't know about the devastating socio-economic consequences, but I do know that we are all well rid of the "centuries-old traditions of sugar production". I cannot believe that this argument could ever form part of an appeal by any self-respecting ex-colonial - but it is the official position of the ACP countries.

According to them:

"It is estimated that the [European] Commission's proposal would lead to a loss in income of up to euro 400 million annually in ACP countries. the knock on effects of this reform, which hardly bear contemplating, would include:
macro-economic instability;
the crippling of national efforts to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals;
the closure of countless estates;
the complete undermining of modernisation efforts already underway within the sugar industry;
the failure of smallholders' cooperatives and collapse of local farmers' banks;
massive unemployment, rural instability and urban migration; a dramatic and alarming increase in poverty; increased crime;
national destablization in all ACP countries and heightened insecurity in the Caribbean region; and
environmental degradation."

If all this were true it would indeed be tragic, except that the foolish virgins of the ACP have known for nearly 40 years that this day would come and did nothing to prepare for it.

If they had had the imagination and the will to act to defend the interests of the ordinary people, the poor, they would not, as Jamaican Prime Minister P J Patterson has done, concentrate on improving the confidence and bank accounts of the rich at the expense of the poor; they would not, as Mr Patterson has done, undertake billion US dollar 'infrastructure programmes to build new highways when what was needed was to build the social infrastructure for human development and to reduce poverty, inequality and crime and violence.

Get a Life!

For 500 years the best land in Jamaica and in the ACP countries has been sequestered by the agents of Diabetes Inc. to produce a 'good' which has no food value although it is classed as a food.

The best agricultural land is held in latifundia, all over the ACP countries, starving the peasants whose forefathers made the latifundistas wealthy, in a social system which destroys families, corrupts, depraves and and devastate community and erodes and devalues social capital.

Before now I have said that growing sugar cane in Jamaica is as appropriate as it would be for the Jews to make bakeries out of the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau.

Because of sugar and its sequestration of land and power, parasitic elites, providing moneylending and merchandising services to the industry, have grown up in turn to batten off the surplus labour of the peasants and to despise them privately as they do explicitly to the Haitians, as incapable of governing themselves.

This, incidentally, is a rich irony, as anyone who has read anything by me over the last year or so will realise, and as some scholars such as Sibylle Fischer, Verene Shepherd and Clinton Hutton are pointing out, the modern world had its genesis in the Caribbean where the Haitians were the first to declare and implement the fundamental, inalienable human rights of every human being.

But the elites - and their honorary brothers-in-office - have always been lazy, have always been able to rely on the softness of heart of their European patrons. When it came to the crunch, the metropole would never let them down.

Of course they don't count what happened upon the abolition of slavery because although they thought the empire niggardly, the owners at least were recompensed for slavery while the slaves were not.

Four decades ago then prime minister of Jamaica, Alexander Bustamante, arrived at my workplace, the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, to demand that I be dismissed, fired, because I had dared to expose a truth: that the British, after exploiting us for 300 years, were leaving us with the munificent gift of the Jamaican army headquarters- which they could not take with them - and enough money to service the government for 11 days. It was lèse majesté to speak like that.

What I had forgotten to say at the time was that the British had 'forgotten' to return a quarter of a million pounds they 'borrowed' from us during the war, and had not recognised the blood sacrifice of Jamaicans killed in Imperial service in West Africa, in the Boer War, in both World Wars, or to even say they were sorry about the hundreds of thousands they had sacrificed in slavery in Jamaica and the millions elsewhere.

As the people of Colombia and Peru are now being punished for the American addiction to cocaine, so were we punished for the European addiction to sugar.

Ask the Cubans about the Platt Amendment which yoked them to sugar in perpetuity to the US in order to finance the Cuban elite and the Mafia, but which, when it came to the crunch in 1960, was found to be dispensable, no matter how much hardship its abrogation would cause the ordinary human beings whose production and labour and humanity were devalued at a stroke - by one flourish of President Eisenhower's pen.

Much of the best land is Jamaica has been effectively idle for decades. As Mr R F Innes, then Director of Research for the Sugar Manufacturers Association said in 1963, Jamaica could be producing then, at least 30 per cent more sugar on the land the estates occupied.

Since then production has declined by 70 per cent, but the land is still sequestered from the people who earned it by their tears, sweat, blood and their suffering, their misery and their dehumanisation.

Meanwhile, as Cuba was doing in 1960, Jamaica is doing now; we are importing tomatoes and cabbage and eggs and bread and water and sugar and you name it from the United States and the people who used to grow or make those things are selling hairpins and boxes of matches by the roadside. They are self-employed entrepreneurs - just like the elite.

During the war, Jamaica could not import food from abroad because all the cargo space available was needed for the war effort. The problem was solved by a functionary called (with bureaucratic felicity), The Competent Authority. This worthy simply decreed that 10 per cent of all sugar lands be planted in food crops.

Now, while in Florida, farmers will produce US$60 million worth of citrus on land equivalent to the acreage occupied by the Monymusk and New Yarmouth sugar estates, in Jamaica we stare vacantly and dream about riches from the land overgrown in bush.

While sugar was king, even when, as recently it was a king in exile, it has always been able to prevent Jamaicans from taking action to save themselves, to rescue, rehabilitate and educate their children and to create caring communities in which crime would be the outsider's game.

We have always known, for instance, why people steal farm produce - praedial larceny it is called here, but we have never attempted to understand how we could get the malefactors to grow their own food and so increase the size of the national bread.

Sugar is the antidote to thought.

Sugar is a specific against imagination, against everything except money and depravity. It incites hyperactivity, noise and mindless idleness.

It is time for us to go cold turkey.To kick the habit. To end the addiction and to go to work for ourselves and our people

A 'Heck' of a world

On Tuesday my email was suddenly populated by spam of a peculiarly sinister sort. Under a variety of inducements, these emails instructed me to open an attachment. I didn't obey the summons. Instead I went to my menu, found the "long header" option and redirected the email to (abuse@xxx.com) the internet service provider from whose domains they had come.

One or two thanked me, although one replied huffily, that I had sent them a forbidden type of attachment. That ISP was probably one of those inundated by the Sober worm which was what my emails contained.

Because I didn't open the suspect emails, my computer was neither affected by the virus nor could it dispatch copies of it to my correspondents, as did the computers of those unwise enough to open the attachments.

I bring this up because the person who sent the worm obviously knows a little psychology. Most people who get an email saying it is from the FBI or CIA and alleging that the users have visited 'illegal websites' are almost certain to open the attachment.

In normal times some of us would have opened the emails anyway, simply out of an ingrained sense of guilt. But I believe the reason this worm spread so fast was that so many people have lost confidence in their governments and are afraid of them, afraid that in this age of War Against Terrorism, they may have unwittingly entrapped themselves and thus need to plea bargain with their minders.

If that is true, it is a frightening index of how the War on Terror has corrupted all of us, from the functionaries of the state to the poor, inoffensive non-journalist who is simply out to have fun on the Internet.

Of course, he or she will have read about the British government invoking the Official Secrets Act to ban any further disclosures about President Bush's reported desire to bomb Al Jazeera. Of course, if the story were not true, it would not be an Official Secret, would it?

We really do live in a hell (ooops ! "Heck") of a world.

Breaches of Trust

2005-11-20T12:00:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

As I understand them, the rules are pretty simple. Freedom of the press is the public's right to truthful information so that people can make up their own minds on matters which may concern their survival, their happiness and their ordinary existence.

Corporations cannot have human rights because they are not human beings. Freedom of expression, of which freedom of the press is just one part, is the essential baseline of democratic organisation. If people do not know the truth, if it is distorted, skewed or hidden from them, they are likely to endanger themselves and others because they do not have the information on which they may act rationally.

It is now clear from the opinion polls that in the matter of the Iraq war, most Americans are now aware that they have been misled, lied to and deceived by their leaders as well as by the press whose duty it is to keep politicians honest and the stream of public information pure and unsullied.

The press, which is one expression of this freedom of expression, has the duty and responsibility to tell the truth as completely and as accurately as it can. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is a rubric not just for the courthouse but for any purveyor of public information.

The people have the right to know where their news originates, just as they have the right to know where their drinking water originates. In both cases, the people have the right to know that what they are consuming has not been tampered with or adulterated in any way.

So I have been bemused first by the case of Judith Miller and now by the case of Bob Woodward. Both claim to be journalists, and until now, both seemed to be. But now both have been exposed as stooges of power, accomplices of people who distort the truth and feed lies to the public to satisfy their own lusts and ambitions.

The recent disclosure by Bob Woodward that he has been, for two years, helping to defend an official programme of lying and disinformation has destroyed for me, whatever credibility Woodward may have had as a chronicler of important events. He is an accomplice in the falsification of history.

Some commentators in the US appear to believe that Woodward's announcement means an 'ease-up' for Mr Scooter Libby, because Woodward has said that Libby was not the first official to leak the name of Valerie Plame to a journalist.

But that is not what Mr Libby is charged with. He is under indictment for lying to a grand jury and to an FBI investigation and for obstruction of justice. Nothing that Mr Woodward has said or can say will change that. In fact, Mr Woodward's testimony may make life more stressful for Mr Libby, since it is probably now possible to reconstruct the lines of an official conspiracy to mislead the American public and the world.

Two questions occur to me in this regard. First is to whom could Mr Woodward have been talking who could have referred, almost as gossip, about Mrs Wilson? The second is why would Mrs Wilson's name have come up in this conversation, apparently, out of the blue?

Mr Woodward has bought himself a lot more time infront of the grand jury and may end up being indicted himself.

Reasonable Doubt

In July 2003, shortly after Ambassador Wilson's op-ed piece in the New York Times exposed the Niger uranium hoax, the Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba told Corriere della Sera that she gave documents on Iraq seeking uranium from Niger to the US embassy in Rome last year to try to find out if the information was credible.

"The story seemed fake to me," she said, and she published nothing on it. "I realised that this could be a worldwide scoop, but . . . if it turned out to be a hoax and I published it I would have ended my career."

Miss Burba had gone to the trouble of going to Niger herself to check the story before turning the papers over to the US embassy in Rome. Presumably she told the embassy what she had done. She heard nothing from the embassy.

One would have imagined that the Embassy would have made its own inquiries before sending suspect documents up the line. It would have been as easy or easier for the Embassy to send a fact checker to Niger as it had been for Miss Burba.to go For some reason, however, they appeared to have simply transmitted the documents to Washington.

Miss Burba says that if the documents were true she would have had a world scoop but that if they were not and she published them it would have meant the end of her career.

If an Italian journalist could have had such reservations, would we not expect that seasoned diplomats and intelligence professionals would have had their own doubts and would have tried to resolve them. They could simply have phoned the French Embassy in Rome or the IAEA in Geneva. They did not apparently do any of these things. The hoax had wheels and was moving fast.

In July 2003 when the hoax fell apart, the Sunday Telegraph phoned the french Ambassador to Niger and the Independent phoned the Niger minister of mines who both dismissed the story out of hand. France controls the mining of uranium in Niger and the International Atomic Energy Agency controls the disposition of uranium. Didn't the US embassy know that?

Miss Burba, according to the Associated press, told Corriere della Sera that the documents appeared to show that Iraq wanted to buy uranium from Niger. She became suspicious because the documents talked about huge amounts of uranium yet were short on details. She then went to Niger.

On her return, she told her editor "the story seemed fake to me". After further discussions, Burba brought the documents to the US embassy. "I went by myself and gave them the dossier. No one said anything more to me," Burba was quoted as saying.

An extract from the top secret National Intelligence Estimate which was used in composing Mr Bush's speech was released by the White House in July 2003. According to that extract, the State department told the CIA that "The claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's [the department's in-house intelligence arm] assessment, highly dubious," the State Department wrote in a 90-page report prepared by the CIA in October.

The State Department's said Saddam Hussein "continues to want nuclear weapons" and is making "at least a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapon-related capabilities". Those activities "do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing an . . . integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons".

One imagines that such a report must have been prepared for the White house, for the National Security Adviser certainly. Condoleezza Rice, who then occupied that position. According to her, when the yellow cake hit the fan, nobody in her neck of the woods was conscious of any doubt about the claim.

However bizarre that explanation sounds, it does make one wonder why then did Mr Bush transfer his source attribution to the British, when his own intelligence agencies had told him four months before, in October, to remove the reference to uranium from a speech he was due to make.

According to a letter written to the chairman of the Permanent Joint House Committee on Intelligence (then congressman, now FBI chief) Porter Goss, Congressman Henry Waxman said that the White house needed to explain the many discrepancies in how the uranium claim came to be used in the president's State of the Union speech.

This was particularly because Mr tenet had fought hard for the removal of a similar reference in the Cincinnati speech and was now being blamed for its inclusion four months later in the State of the Union speech.

Mr Waxman also wanted to understand Ms Rice's claim on "Face the Nation in July 2003, that "Had there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in or that George tenet did not want that sentence in, that the Director of Central Intelligence did not want it in, it would have gone."

Can anyone believe that Ms Rice, her deputy, Stephen Hadley and whoever was the speechwriter, were not aware of the brouhaha about the Cincinnatti speech? That they did not know of the State department's reservations?

It is clear to me either that the conspiracy is much bigger than anyone seems to think or that the entire Bush White house spends lots of time asleep at the wheel.Whichever is true, it seems to me that there should be some extremely important changes coming soon in the makeup of the Bush Administration.

As Mr Waxman put it two years ago, the credibility of the United States is at stake. It has since been shredded by all the disclosure about torture, outsourcing torture, secret prisons, terror weapons and other flagrant breaches of the human rights of Americans, Iraquis, Muslims in general and all sorts of other people, not to mention the Haitian people moldering away in their island concentration camp.

There was always the lingering belief that when all else failed, the American press would rise up and do its duty. Bob Woodward has for 30 years been a worldwide icon for the integrity and doggedness of the press in the pursuit of the truth. Today, the reputation of the administration is in tatters and the probity of the press is seen to be a comforting myth.

There are just two developments to be optimistic about. The Congress and the American public both appear to be awakening after a long slumber, induced by the opiate of the Big Lie. It is not only Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro and their people who feel menaced by a superpower apparently out of control.

The rest of the world is just as uncomfortable. But even if balance, peace and rationality are restored, most of us outside the United States will not be comforted by the knowledge that it is so easy for a small group of dedicated and unscrupulous men to capture the wheelhouse of the world's only remaining superpower and steer it to destabilise, fragment and eventually obliterate any chance of a peaceful world order, wondering if they will wake up to smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds.

Almost exactly four years ago, in November 2001, then Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is that your tactics aid terrorists".
He was not talking about the government of the USA but about the Taliban.

Rightwing commentator William Safire said in that same week: "The sudden seizure of power by the executive branch, bypassing all constitutional checks and balances, is beginning to be recognized by cooler heads in the White House, Defense Department and C.I.A. as more than a bit excessive" and Safire believed that the American constitution, the American legal system, American journalism and other democratic institutions would, with spirit of the American people, soon put things to rights.

He was wrong.

Let Them Eat Merde

2005-11-13T12:00:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

"Man is born free and everywhere is in chains" was said by a Frenchman, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Two centuries after Rousseau, another Frenchman, one Nicholas Sarkozy describes millions of his fellow citizens as "scum", among several other pungent epithets directed at them because they happen not to belong to what Sarkozy clearly conceives of as the master race.

Fortunately for France, its president, himself no paragon of egalitarian virtue, is at least more intelligent and civilised than Sarkozy. Speaking at a news conference with the visiting Spanish prime minister, President Chirac said: "Once order is restored, France will have to draw the consequences of this crisis, and do so with a lot of courage and lucidity.

"There is a need to respond strongly and rapidly to the undeniable problems faced by many residents of underprivileged neighbourhoods around our cities."

A French firefighter tries to extinguish a car set alight by rioters in Venissieux, a district of Les Minguettes, near the central French city of Lyon, Thursday, 10 Nov. 2005 (Photo: AP)

It seems that the statesmen of the world are divided, like the general populations, into the realists and the fantasists. Sarkozy wants Chirac's job and he is appealing to the crasser sentiments of his fellow citizens, a sizeable portion of whom voted for Chirac's racist opponent last time the president was elected. He calculates that with the hardcore of the Gaullist movement allied to the far right fascism of the ultra-nationalists, his bid for the presidency is all but assured.

It may well be, but a Sarkozy government of France may very well provoke the defining convulsion of the 21st century civil commotion which will not be confined to France or to Europe but spread to the whole world. As Mr Blair has been told by a panel of advisers, reacting violently to terrorism is more likely to spread the disorder than contain it. His parliament was wiser than Blair; they defeated his propoal for a 90-day police detention without trial.

American observers of the nearly two weeks of rioting in France have consoled themselves with the thought that the underclass exposed by Katrina was as nothing compared to the French landscape of burning cars and looted shops. They forget that while the American race problem is five hundred years old.

The problem inside France is less than 50. And despite the mess they made of Haiti, the French did have the nerve, and the humanity, immediately after the Second World War, to try, however timidly, to integrate their colonies into their nation.

They can also point to such as Gaston Monnerville, a black man born in French Guiana (Cayenne) President of the French Assembly and of the French Senate, French delegate to the inauguiral meeting of the UN in 1945. They can also point to Alexandre Dumas and even to Napoleon's Empress Josephine. The United States has no comparable examples.

If, however Sarkozy goes where only Petain has gone before, it seems pretty clear that he will bring down on France and probably Europe and possibly much of the world, the conflict which the fundamentalist Christians have been waiting for, the clash between civilisations, the war between Islam and Christianity Armageddon. (Incidentally, this week, the remains of a Christian church were found at Armageddon now the site of a prison.)

Naima Bouteldja on Z-Net, quotes Laurent Levy, a founding member of the Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic, a network which campaigns against the "oppression and discrimination produced by the post-colonial [French] Republic".

Levy says, "the explosion is long overdue. When large sections of the population are denied any kind of respect, the right to work, the right to decent accommodation, and often the right to even access clubs and cafés, then what is surprising is not that the cars are burning but that there are so few uprisings of this nature."

There is a structural peculiarity in the French North African ghettos: because they were purposely built to accommodate the immigrants, there is very little communal mixing. Structurally, discrimination is therefore much easier; as in the Jamaican slums, your postal address condemns you. In the French ghettos, one in two inhabitants is under 20, and nearly one in two is unemployed.

The stimulus for the recent riots was the electrocution of two youths coming from a football match, who hid in an electricity substation simply to avoid the identity checks and police harassment which are a daily torment.

A euphemism for slavery

The pundits of the western world are sure that all France needs to overcome these problems is to embrace globalisation and to tear down its welfare state. The problem, as millions in France and in this hemisphere see it, is that globalisation is another word for imperialist exploitation and competitiveness is a euphemism for slavery.

When Chirac says, "Whatever our origins, we are all the children of the Republic and we can all expect the same rights", he is in direct opposition to the rightwing globaliser, Sarkozy, who dismisses Chirac's "children of the Republic" as "yobs", "fundamentalists", "riff-raff" and "vermin" and speaks of the need for the suburban ghettos to "to be cleaned out with Karsher", an industrial cleanser Sarkozy's problem, and George Bush's, is that 50 years on there are millions of Rosa Parkses around the world who are refusing to be moved to the back of the bus.

Last week in Mar del Plata, tens of thousand showed up to explain their feelings to Mr Bush, only to be dismissed by the US press as just another bunch of unruly noisemakers.

The US press general tried to downplay the size of the demonstration and to connect the peaceful demonstration addressed by Hugo Chavez and Cindy Sheehan, among others, to the nihilistic troublemakers who torched banks and multinational brand named shops hours later, and miles away.

It was strange that 40 years after the US managed to throw Cuba out of the Organisation of American States, another US president was trying to neutralise another Latin spokesman and hero. Forty years ago it was Che Guevara, leading the Cuban delegation as Minister of Economics, who told the Americans that their mini-globalisation project, then called Alianza para Progreso, Alliance for progress, would not work.

Last week Hugo Chavez was saying the same thing about the Free Trade Area of the Americas. This time the anti-hero, Chavez, had with him not only the crowd, as Guevara had, but the presidents of Latin America's most important nations.

Forty years ago these countries were ruled by American approved caudillos. This week, Fujimori is in jail in Chile and Evo Morales, an indigenous American, is favoured to become the next president of Bolivia. Morales also spoke at the demonstratiion in Mar del Plata with Chavez, making it clear that as far as his Movement Toward Socialism was concerned, national resources were national property to be used in the national interest.

Across the Atlantic, in Nigeria, the Ogoni people were this week in the 10th year of their mourning for their hero, Ken Saro Wiwa, who they say was executed by the government of their country, by the military dictator Sani Abacha, a man who got along well with the transnational corporations. The Ogoni people say Saro-Wiwa was framed by the military.

In a memoir published this week his son wrote: "His death on 10 November 1995 shook the world. John Major [then British PM] described the trial that sent him to the gallows as a 'fraudulent trial, a bad verdict, an unjust sentence'.

Nelson Mandela thundered that 'this heinous act by the Nigerian authorities flies in the face of appeals by the world community for a stay of execution'. Bill Clinton and the Queen added their voices to the worldwide condemnation, Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth, countries recalled their diplomats and there were calls for economic sanctions and a boycott of Shell oil."

Ten years later, Shell still devastates the Ogoni homeland with oil spills and other environmental abuse and waste. More than 900 million barrels of Nigerian sweet crude (the easiest to refine and most profitable) have been pumped out of the Ogoni homeland since 1958.

"All told, there were once over a 100 oil wells, a petrochemical complex, two oil refineries and a fertiliser plant in the region.

"An area which, as my father once wrote, should have been as rich as a small Gulf state, stood as an example of how Africa's rich natural resources have impoverished its people and the land they live off.

"Associated natural gas has been flared into the atmosphere for over 40 years in Nigeria - pumping noxious fumes into the atmosphere. Nigeria alone accounts for 28 per cent of total gas flared in the world and the flared gas volume in Nigeria translates into the crude oil equivalent of 259,000 barrels per day."

Western governments now get more from gasoline taxes than the oil producing states get for selling the raw material to the oil companies. The US and Canadian government get slightly less than the equivalent of the FOB price, which itself is more than the oil producers get.

Japan, Italy, Germany, France and particularly the United kingdom, get considerably more from oil than the oil producing states or even the companies.

And when one considers that this year one oil company, Exxon-Mobil, in three months had over $100 billion in sales and more than $9 billion in profits you may appreciate the kind of money being made outside of the oil producing countries.

In the Niger delta, public dissatisfaction with the unsustainable mining of oil has taken drastic forms. There is sabotage, kidnapping and murder. There is also increasingly sophisticated siphoning of oil from pipelines, now estimated to cost Shell up to 15% of daily production ? for resale to tankers bound for the world market!! Free enterprise for you.

Delta residents, "most of whom earn less than $1 a day", accuse oil companies of colluding with Nigeria's government to foment divisions between rival community groups in a strategy to deprive them of benefits from oil.

That doesn't happen in Venezuela, where the government of Hugo Chavez has nationalised the oil industry. For decades Venezuela has been one of the world's largest oil producers (It is now number five and Nigeria is eighth) but the people of Venezuela never saw the benefits of their oil riches.

Under Chavez things have changed. Oil revenues are being poured into public works and social programmes. A nationwide chain of low price supermarkets is run by the state, thousands of schools have been built, there are thousands of medical clinics staffed by Cuban doctors and university education is free and is available to almost anyone who wants one.

Outside of Venezuela Chavez is exchanging oil for medical and other technical assistance from Cuba and is funding, in PetroCaribe, a plan to bring cheaper fuel and the chance to invest savings to Caribbean countries including Jamaica. No wonder Chavez is a superstar in Latin America. No wonder Mr Bush and his cohorts hate him.

Political influenza

Chavez is to Bush the political equivalent of avian flu: enormously dangerous and extremely contagious. No wonder that Bush intimates such as the Rev Dr Pat Robertson consider Chavez such bad news.

In October, a few months after having half apologised for advocating the murder of Chavez, Robertson said on CNN: "[The US] could face a nuclear attack from Venezuela.

The truth is, this man is setting up a Marxist-type dictatorship in Venezuela, he's trying to spread Marxism throughout South America, he's negotiating with the Iranians to get nuclear material and he also sent $1.2 million in cash to Osama bin Laden right after 9-11."

The televangelist maintained that Chavez sent a "warm congratulatory letter to Carlos the Jackal, he's a friend of Muammar Qaddafi". He said, "He's made common cause with these people that are considered terrorists."

Meanwhile, safe and sound in the US are Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, two of the last century's most dangerous terrorists, one pardoned by President Bush I, the other protected by a system which says he cannot be extradited to Venezuela because he might face torture there.

Of course, the US is very sound on the question of torture. This week the US senate voted to investigate how come it was disclosed in the Washington Post that the CIA had perhaps dozens of secret prisons cum torture facilities round the world.

They didn't vote to investigate the scandal, but to investigate those who brought it to public notice.

They forgot, however, that we've known about the secret prisons for a long time. In may last year Human Rights Watch estimated that there were 10,000 prisoners in these satanic dungeons from more than 20 countries, some of them children, some of them innocent adults just "scraped up" on suspicion.

Among these is at least one journalist, a Sudanese employee of Al Jazeera Sami Muhy al-Din al-Hajj, arrested by the US military while working for Al jazeera during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and detained in Guantanamo for four years without trial.

Aljazeera.net spoke to al-Hajj's lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, regarding his case and the prospects for his release.
He said al-Hajj had suffered extreme physical and sexual abuse and religious persecution.

According to al Hajji, he is being tortured not for information but for something more important, to get him to accept American money to denounce his employers as an arm of Al Qaeda. When next the assorted heroes of journalism are saluted, perhaps the hero-makers might care to take a look at the case of Sami Muhy al-Din al-Hajj.

Did I hear right? "Extreme physical and sexual abuse" in the War against Terror?

The Nescafé Machine

2005-11-06T12:00:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It sits balefully in the corner of the restaurant, with dials labelled 'coffee', water', 'sugar' and one or two other descriptors. When I asked the waitress for coffee, preferably 'espresso' she referred me to the machine. I put my cup underneath the spot marked coffee and turned the dial, expecting a flow of something that would be identifiable as coffee.

What came out was about a teaspoon of powdered ersatz coffee. I had no choice, I turned the dial again for another teaspoonful and then the sugar dial and the water dial and having fabricated my cup of 'coffee', I went back to my seat and ingested it.

Most sinister of all, I thought, was the dial labelled 'whitener'. There is no longer any euphemism; no more 'creamer' - fabricated from beans or petroleum or "corn syrup solids, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, sodium caseinate (a milk derivative 0, dipotassium phosphate, monodiglycerides, sodium aluminsilicate, diacetyl tartaric acid ester of mono and diglycerides artificial flavour and artificial colours".

I don't use creamers or cosmetic whiteners or milk. But Nestlé has a place in my pantheon of the wicked because having exploited Jamaica and Jamaican dairy farmers for more than 60 years, and having bought out Jamaica's last big icecream maker, they promptly shut down the factories, threw thousands of Jamaicans out of work and moved to the Dominican Republic where there would be no troubles from unions or laws regulating decent treatment of workers and severance pay.

Others doing similar moves included Goodyear, Reckitt and Colman, Carreras and that one-time paragon of Jamaican cleanliness, once called Soap and Edible products, transformers of the coconut into cooking oil, animal feed and cosmetics, now merely a distributor of stuff bought abroad.

Countries which used to feed and clothe themselves now must borrow money to pay for food imported from the US. Jamaica's trade deficit is twice as high as much as it earns from exports of all kinds. We now import sugar and water from the US and ice cream from the Dominican Republic and cigarettes from Trinidad.

This is called globalisation, and is said to be a boon to the developing world, according to people as wise as President Bush, Mr Tony Blair and the Prime Minister of Jamaica, Mr Patterson.

An alumina refinery plant in Jamaica

Meanwhile, people who should be engaged in production, in farming and in teaching, are busy firing guns imported from the United States at each other, to the horror of the US, which tells its nationals to beware of Jamaica ! Don't go there!!. "Don't go there."

The blessings of Globalisation

The blessings of globalisation include strip mining the countryside, extracting millions of tons of Jamaican earth, dosing it with caustic soda and bombarding it with electric charges and exporting a white powder called alumina and a green material called super profits.

Jamaica gets to keep enormous holes in the ground and the effluent that is gently, invisibly, percolating down into the water table and gradually poisoning our water supplies.

But, not to worry, globalisation will mean that we will be able to buy water from Exxon and Shell as a cheap by-product of their global warming experiment.

If only we had forced the aluminum companies to leave a little bauxite to line the mined-out craters landscape, we might have been able to store some of the flooding we can now confidently expect from fossil fueled hurricanes, which are now becoming more and more cost effective at slum clearance and electoral redistricting. Progress, I tell you, it is wonderful!

Sadly, there are those who don't want to accommodate themselves to the inexorable crunch of development. In that famously independent little island, Anguilla, the government has decided to put a moratorium on large developments because such projects are threatening to overwhelm the island by swamping its labour force and population with imported manpower and womanpower, suffocating the culture of Anguilla and replacing it with Bush knows what.

As I write this, we are flying over the southern coast of the Dominican Republic where there is evidence of rivers running loose, eroded hillsides and vast areas of unused land. I know that if we fly over the republic's border with Haiti, even this unpromising landscape will make Haiti's look like a desert.

Further west of course, lie Jamaica, where I am headed, and Cuba, a mythical country where every person is said to have a job and where every child, it is alleged, goes to school. This story is obviously invented to upset Americans and to spread disaffection and bad feelings among the Latin and Caribbean leaders meeting this weekend down Argentine way.

The last time the US supped with the Latins was at the Organisations of American States special meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida earlier this year, when Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State made it known that the United States wished to impose some new rules on its neighbours.

The most important was one allowing the united states and whichever state felt able to be its ally, to invade any other state which the US did not consider to be behaving according to established democratic norms.

The Latins, uncharitable as usual, did not agree with this new dispensation, because as they saw it, it would allow the US to invade any other state with whom it did not happen to agree at any time.

The lever of their independence

Oddly, because of the racism built in to the Latin cultures, none of these states brought up the question of Haiti, which, more than any other factor, was the main lever of their own independence.

In the second decade of the 19th century, when Simon Bolivar saw a whole continent waiting to be liberated but found himself without the means to begin the job, it was to Haiti he turned, the first independent state in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States.

At that time the Haitians were determined to do all they could to assist the liberation of Latin America from the Spaniards, so they gave Bolivar arms, money and encouragement, sending him off to liberate Gran Colombia, asking Bolivar to liberate all slaves wherever he found them. Since many of Bolivar's best generals were black that should have been easy, but the Haitians reckoned without the spiteful selfishness of the United States which saw the ending of slavery as a direct threat to its own economic system.

And when the freed Spanish colonies came together with the US in the first Summit of the Americas in Panama in 1824, the only independent state not represented there was the prime mover in their liberation- Haiti.

Haiti, being a black state, is quite frequently invisible to world statesmanship; since black is the absence of light in physics, the doctrine of intelligent political design has never been able to discern the human rights of the Haitian people.

This is ironic, since it was the Haitians who first implemented the doctrine of the universal rights of man. The French and the American revolutions, which had preached that doctrine, maintained slavery for decades after they themselves were free.

This is more than a rhetorical statement. Margaret Laurent, perhaps the most eloquent of the fighters for Haitian freedom now writing, believes that the recolonisation of Haiti is an essential fraction of the doctrine of globalisation.

"...In Haiti, the imperialists have also found the formula for outsourcing wars so that the blood of their sons and daughters are not on the line."

A prison for children

The UN forces in Haiti, are made up of troops from the developing countries. These poor, black and brown soldiers are now fighting the imperialist's' wars for him in Haiti.

Even the African Union's rejection of the re-colonisation of Haiti is reported to have been neutralised with the sending to Haiti of African soldiers from the Francophone countries. Not surprising, considering France's investment in Haiti's bicentennial coup d'etat.

It was, after all, Francophone Africa that was used to stop the spread of Pan-Africanism after the independence movement, mainly through French expatriates like Houphouet Boigny and Leopold Senghor.

In Margaret Laurent's opinion, the recolonisation of Haiti is not simply a political action, it is part of a programme to criminalise the people of Haiti and to control them by taking away all their rights.

"The scariest thing to happen to Haiti and Haitians this month, has gone unnoticed with these election terrors of the imperialists and their Haitian sycophants morbidly drawing attention away from the colonial realities of the matter.

"USAID has started its FIRST prison for children in Haiti.

"Yes, the systematic criminalisation of young black males in Haiti, parallels their criminalisation in the US. There are some white towns in the US where the towns people's sole income comes from the incarceration of young black and brown men who make up the bulk of the prisoners.

"The imperialists' game plan for Haitian boys and men, is moving along well. By the time a puppet Haitian president, like Preval, Simeus or Bazin, is installed in Haiti on February, 2006, more prison centres will have to be built to contain the Haitian 'criminal elements'."

Laurent argues that the RE-installation of former US Ambassador to Haiti, Timothy Carney, is a portent of things to come. Carney was the leader of the so-called Haitian Democracy Project, a fascist front organisation funded by the US Republican party which was responsible for the coordination of the coup d'etat against Aristide.

This group paid and bribed a collection of Haitian 'civil society" organisations to form an anti-Aristide bloc which though small and representing little more than its sparse membership, was given yards of print and hours of television publicity in the run up to the so-called rebellion, carried out by mercenary gangsters armed and uniformed by the United States.

Since that time the US/Canadian/French governing coalition has imprisoned without cause or due process, a constellation of Haitian popular leaders, from the former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and Father Gerard Jean Juste, the leader of the Lavalas movement to the Haitian equivalent of Jamaica's Louise Bennett, a folklorist named Anne August - "So Anne".

While these representatives of Haitian politics and culture are in jail and unable to function, the tripartite coalition is proceeding with its sham election which is intended to provide a legitimate democratic face for the fascist gangsters who actually rule Haiti.

To the puppetmasters, it does not matter that most of the Haitian people are disfranchised and that the major political force in Haiti has been neutered, their money and influence will provide solutions acceptable to the corrupt and spineless North Atlantic press.

What is planned for Haiti may be gauged by examining the US plan for a transition to democracy in Cuba detailed in a 423-page report prepared in May 2004 for Bush and signed by Colin Powell, then Secretary of State. It represents the official policy of the United States toward Cuba. ( http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rt/cuba/commission/2004/c12236.htm)

Among the gems: "The US Government and private organisations have determined that there may very well exist a severe case of malnutrition and lack of available supply and money to feed the Cuban people, or sectors of the Cuban people, to avoid massive sickness and disease.

"Should the food security system in Cuba deteriorate and malnutrition rates rise, children under five will be at particular risk." (page 80) Cuba's education system, recognised by UNESCO, the World Bank and the UN as one of the best in the world will be destroyed in the interest of democracy and replaced by schools run by fundamentalist fanatics:

"[The United States must] Prepare to respond positively to a request from transition authorities to help keep schools open, even if teachers are paid with food aid or volunteers have to be temporarily imported, in order to keep children and teenagers off the streets during this potentially unstable period."

The Offices of Non/Public Schools and Faith-Based Initiatives, US Department of Education, could serve as facilitating agencies in ensuring that the system recognises private as well as public educational providers, and could:

"Facilitate the development of private, including faith-based, education.
"Ascertain which of the religious groups that had schools in Cuba have plans to reopen their schools.
"Assist in consideration of changing laws and regulations to permit private providers to operate and offer a full range of services, from short courses to degree programmes."

It is clear that the transition to democracy in Cuba involves the destruction of the entire Cuban culture and all the institutions of the Cuban state. It envisages a reduction to conditions of lawlessness, hunger, privation and social disruption.

If Cuba is to be treated in this way, the decapitation of democracy in Haiti may very well lead to much, much worse - to the hell that Margaret Laurent envisages, because the Haitians, as we have seen, are not regarded as human by the United States, the Canadians and the French.

They will be easier to subdue than the Cubans. And no one will say a word.

'None Dare Call it Treason'

2005-10-30T12:00:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

I've never had particularly warm feelings towards either President Bush or his Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney spooked me early - as soon as I discovered that having been tasked to find a Vice Presidential running mate for George Bush, he selected himself.

Later, when his wife disclosed some of his personal predilections, he spooked me even more. It had been her husband's habit, Mrs Cheney said, to baby-sit his infant daughters by taking them with him to view Civil War battlefields.

To me, the story suggested a racist bitter-ender, obsessing about what might have been had Robert E Lee been more successful. Fanciful? Perhaps, but the behaviour of Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration since has given me no cause to revise my speculation. They have emphasised their racist agenda in many ways, from Affirmative Action to Katrina, from Haiti to Darfur - and of course, above all, in Iraq. And the main architect has been Mr Cheney.

So, although like every other Cassandra in the world I hate saying 'I told you so', it was not without some satisfaction that I watch the howling winds of Hurricane Patrick approaching Washington as I write, while the greedy and the powerful, the mighty and the unscrupulous, sit quivering and agonising about the wrath to come.

And although, as I write, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had not handed up an indictment for Dick Cheney, I have no doubt that one is in the offing. I believe that he is the main - if not 'onlie begetter' - of the devastation about to engulf the Bush Administration over the next few weeks and months.

Although Mr Cheney may have been mysteriously absent at crucial times in the history of this administration, his ever-present snarl, like the evanescent grin of the Cheshire Cat, has hovered over everything.

His secret task force on energy was, I postulate, the blueprint for the Iraq war. And that is the reason its deliberations are still secret. The war was not for ridding the world of Saddam except and inasmuch that his removal would have been expected to make the American take-over of Iraq's oilfields less expensive in terms of bodies destroyed, and more cost-effective in every other way.

The war was not for spreading democracy - a concept foreign to the imaginations of the administration; it was not for improving the conditions of the Iraqi people; it was not even for safeguarding Israel. It was all about oil. Everything else was secondary, including humanity, history and civilisation. And that is why it was so important that a credible case had to be made out that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons.

Without that crucial piece of 'evidence' the United States was unlikely to recruit any UN allies in the run-up to its Iraq misadventure. It was important to scare the American people with the idea of a 'smoking gun' in the guise of a mushroom cloud, to terrify the British with the idea that Saddam had the capacity to obliterate the Royal Family and every fish and chips and curry take-out in Britain at 45 minutes' notice. The prospect made their flesh creep, in the words of one cabinet minister.

None dare call it Treason

In the sixteenth century Sir John Harrington wrote:

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

Had the Iraq War been the 'slam dunk" its progenitors predicted, the minor matter of a forged bill of goods would probably not have come up for 50 years, when historians might have disinterred it. But it didn't happen that way.

Although the war had actually started when the fraud was exposed, the "Shock and Awe" son et lumiere production which had been meant to herald it had to be postponed for all kinds of pesky formalities, by which time the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had already discounted the documents as 'crude forgeries'.

Even the chosen messenger, an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba, had discounted the authenticity of the documents before she handed them over to the Italian authorities.

The visit of Ambassador Wilson to Niger was simply to confirm what the CIA had known, before it saw the documents, that the story was a fake. The CIA knew what Cheney, Libby, Bush and Rove did not know: that Niger cannot sell uranium to anyone since the sale of Niger uranium is controlled by three western companies under the strict supervision of the IAEA.

So, the frantic attempt to discredit Ambassador Wilson was crucial, because Mr Cheney had long before 'discredited' the CIA, and the White House was paying no attention to its main intelligence agency and hoping no one else was. The White House Iraq Group - WHIG - believed it had all the intelligence it needed. And with Tony Blair prepared to lie (as he still is) the way was clear.

Homage to the Discredited

Some of my readers have chastised me for being too hard on Mrs Judith Miller, that soon-to-be ex-employee of the New York Times newsroom. I really, really, really, do hate to say 'I told you so', but everything that has happened since my column appeared has proven me correct. Mrs Miller was stooging for Mr Libby and Mr Cheney. In the process she revealed that she had earlier been co-opted by the Pentagon and allowed to see top secret documents under a special, personal clearance. None of this was communicated to her editor.

It is my contention that since the editor normally is the person designated to go to jail in any cataclysmic conflict between a newspaper and the law, no reporter can take it upon himself to compromise the editor and the newspaper by attempting to guarantee the 'confidentiality' of any source.

The public has a right to know the source of the news. Confidential sources may be used if no other source is available AND if the story is of such transcendental importance that the public interest would be harmed by not publishing. Whatever the reason, the editor must be certain that the source is reliable and trustworthy. It would be a dereliction of duty for an editor to allow someone like Mrs Miller to vouch for the bona fides of any source, particularly when her sources had already proved to be spectacularly wrong, spectacularly prejudiced and spectacularly unreliable.

NYT publisher Sulzberger and editor Keller sat by and allowed Mrs Miller to hijack the New York Times' reputation, credibility and honour, and they too deserve to be fired. As Maureen Dowd has said, Mrs Miller's time in jail may have been an attempt at career rehabilitation. It had nothing whatever to do with defending the freedom of the press.

And it may be useful to remember in all of this that freedom of the press is a public right. It does not belong to the press. It is meant to guarantee that the public gets all the information they need to make up their minds - the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. They need to be able to rationally decide, for instance, whether they wish to have their children face death in a war to defend the remainder of their freedoms.

In this case, the press surrendered its responsibilities to people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and lent them the confidence that they could walk on water and defy common sense, common decency, public opinion and the law. What they were walking on was the turf on the grave of democracy.

They very nearly succeeded in making the United States into a one-party state. If you don't believe me, consider the curious case of the Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court.

Ms Miers was spectacularly unqualified, a fact which was obvious even in such dark corners of the world as Jamaica. She may be a very nice lady and a good lawyer in her own specialities, but she was not known to be a constitutional scholar or to be interested in such matters.

Her nomination seemed to be proceeding along a rocky but well trodden path until, horror of horrors, it became known that she had been an advocate of sexual and ethnic affirmative action. Nobody now mentions this disaster, but Ms Miers nomination was holed below the waterline by that disclosure.

With everything the press knows about Ms Miers, there was hardly any reasoned criticism of a woman who, had her nomination been confirmed, would have been making constitutional law for perhaps decades to come, deciding matters of life and death, of security and happiness of people not only in the United States but all over the world - in Haiti, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq, for instance.

The press was unperturbed that the president and the Republican Party saw the nomination as an opportunity to put the stamp of the American Taliban- the right-wing fundamentalist - creationists upon the Supreme Court of the United States. They have not been concerned when it is clear that the Republicans are anxious to deform the law and pervert the constitution to suit their prejudices.

They are not concerned that radical extremists are not satisfied that all but two of the judges on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents. Like the Judas Goat, they are prepared to lead the US down a path charted by people like Dick Cheney, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
In the words of Hilaire Belloc:

"...the stocks were sold; the press was squared,
The middle class was quite prepared."

Unfortunately, after 2,000 of their children have been slaughtered and another 15,000 maimed, the American people have terminally lost confidence in Mr Bush, none more so than the black minority, whose support of the Republicans and Mr Bush is said to be two - within the statistical margin of error. That is to say - apart from Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas and Gerard La Tortue - there may be no black American citizen now prepared to believe anything Mr Bush says.

And the population as a whole? If an election were to be held today, more than half (55 per cent) are now prepared to vote for any Democratic candidate in preference to Mr Bush. The tragedy is two-fold: Mr Bush is the same person he was in November last year and the press knew then exactly who he was.

They just didn't bother to inform the people who pay their salaries.

Freedom of the press they preach; freedom of the press they do not practise.

Vandalism and Slavery

2005-10-23T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Vandalism is the barbarian's tribute to that to which he considers himself inferior. When the Spanish conquistadors destroyed the Aztec/Maya cultures they were performing the same ritual which Napoleon's troops enacted three hundred years later when they shelled the negroid lips and nose of the Sphinx in Egypt.

They didn't understand and were intimidated, so they destroyed the sources of their discomfort - the evidence of their assumed inferiority.

In the "New World", the Spaniards collided with a number of ancient civilisations, Aztec, Maya and in South Americas, the Inca, and all of them shared, among other things, a calendar which, although much older, is said to be more accurate than the Gregorian calendar in use in Europe at that time.

The New World cultures were so thoroughly ransacked and pillaged that it is extremely difficult to tell much about their origins or their level of achievement. And especially, they cannot easily be connected to the precedent Olmec civilisation which must have bequeathed some of its characteristics to the newcomers.

The Olmecs tantalise us and confound certain historians in that they appear to have been negroid people, judging from the enormous carved heads they left behind.

Of course, European Christians like the Spaniards would have found it difficult anyway to give the slightest credence to the idea that blacks, as the Olmecs at least, would have seemed to them, could possibly be of the same level of humanity as they were, especially because they (the Spaniards) were proving the moral and intellectual superiority of European civilisation by employing the Chinese invention of gunpowder.

Mayan ruins in an old civilisation
And since the Spaniards and their fellow Europeans were about to embark on the most ambitious exercise in parasitism known to mankind - the institution of black plantation slavery- it would have been highly inconvenient for them to believe that they were enslaving civilised people. Except, of course, that they may have been taking revenge for the conquest and six centuries of occupation of Spain by Africans.

It isn't nice to bring up these matters, and positively indecent to suggest that there may have been civilisations antecedent to the Greeks and Romans - especially since the Ancient Egyptians have been rebranded as Honorary Whites.

The enormity of such a crime may be gauged by Mr Rumsfeld's response to the sacking of Baghdad's museums and the treasury of ancient history that was Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld's God, like General Boykins and Pizarro's, is obviously bigger than anybody else's.

These remarks are provoked by an occurrence this week in Paris, where the United States received its most decisive rebuff ever in the international arena. The UNESCO General Conference voted by more than 150 votes to two to endorse a new Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression. The only countries to vote against the convention were the United States and Israel. Four countries abstained: Australia, Nicaragua, Honduras and Liberia.

The United States was incensed at its defeat. It had offered 28 amendments and every one was rejected. The US Ambassador to UNESCO Louise Oliver described the convention as "a hastily drafted text which is subject to misinterpretation and abuse in ways that could undermine rather than promote cultural diversity".

UNESCO's Director General Koichiro Matsuura, says: "This Declaration, which sets against inward-looking fundamentalism the prospect of a more open, creative and democratic world, is now one of the founding tenets of the new ethics, promoted by UNESCO in the early twenty-first century. My hope is that one day it may acquire the same force as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

The Americans fear that the convention will be used to counter the globalisation of American culture. Right now the US is in a quarrel with South Korea over that country's insistence on limiting American penetration of its cultural space by legislating face time on Korean television for Korean culture.

The United States will probably not be too discommoded by this convention, and may, as in the case of the International Criminal Court, simply blackmail smaller nations into yielding to cultural rape. Most other countries support the UNESCO idea that a convention is needed to promote indigenous and other ethnic traditions and minority (that is non-English) languages, and protect national and local cultures from the negative impacts of globalisation.

In this connection I am happy to relate that the McDonald's Corporation has conceded defeat in its decade -long attempt to infiltrate the Jamaican fast-food market. Beginning last Wednesday, the McDonald's stores are up for auction. Jamaica must be the first country in the world to achieve this distinction.

Jamaica is not a lost cause for transnational fast-food chains however. Although a number of them including Shakey's Pizza, Taco Bell and Kenny Rogers' Chicken have also failed to make a dent here, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King are alive and well. But while a place like Jamaica may defend itself against fast food and perhaps American music, it can offer no real defence against language, the gun culture, or US film, video/TV or book and magazine publishing.

Many other countries can offer no defence at all to any intrusion, and the result could well be that the arbitrament of scale will win out against good taste and cultural imperatives. And, as I say, conventions don't mean much to the US, if one remembers for instance the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the Nuremberg precedents.

In the Caribbean we have two glaring examples of US disregard for what the rest of the world terms Justice and Law.

The Men in the Iron Masks

In Guantanamo Bay, the US has captured a sizeable piece of Cuban territory and claims it as its own, but, when convenient, the US also claims that it owes no duty to recognise US law at Guantanamo Bay, because it is not American territory.

Because of this, hundreds of people are held like medieval prisoners, without charge, without access to justice or mercy, force-fed while shackled to their beds when they have the temerity to protest by refusing to eat. If, as the Bush administration claims, the internees are being treated humanely, one wonders what the prisoners would do if the conditions were inhumane.

If people are willing to fast unto death to get out of this humane treatment, inhumane treatment by the US must be another dimension of horror entirely.

Last week, the Ibero-American summit rebuffed the US, as I reported. But the US still insists it has a right to wage an undeclared war against Cuba while insisting that Cuba, under American attack, should behave according to the very same democratic ideals the US itself has discarded in its PATRIOT Act and similar legislation and practice. The United States is busy kidnapping people from foreign countries and shipping them off to be tortured in places like Uzbekistan and Egypt (and Guantanamo Bay) with human rights records that cannot stand comparison with Cuba's.

Next door to Cuba is Haiti where the United States and its quondam allies France and Canada, are determined to make the Haitians pay for their temerity in defining a new standard in human civilisation.

I have become convinced that the real motive for the two hundred years war against Haiti by France and the United States arises from the simple fact that the Haitians were the first people in the world to abolish slavery on their own - and then go on to proclaim universal human rights. Although France and the US in their revolutions had proclaimed the Rights of Man, it was the Haitians who first promulgated them.

The French, having been twice defeated by their former slaves, subjugated Haiti with the help of the United States by the same process of blackmail now being used against Cuba. Unless Haiti agreed to pay an indemnity of billions to the French, the newly independent republic would be denied all opportunity to trade and develop.

Thus, the French, in concert with the US, achieved by compound interest what they had not been able to achieve by war.
Haiti is the model for the new slavery by globalisation. Having been made utterly destitute by commercial exploitation and conquest, the Haitians are now thought to deserve no say in their own affairs.

The racist prescription for Haiti can be read most succinctly in a piece last week in the Washington Post by one James Harding, formerly of the Financial Times. In a piece last Sunday entitled "In Haiti, the Vote Isn't Nearly Powerful Enough" Harding writes from Port-au-Prince:

"Beyond the poverty statistics and the kidnapping numbers, the signs of Haiti's miserable failure as a country are literally littered across the capital: the rats squirming across the piles of garbage that festoon the streets; the bloated corpse of a dog lying on the roadside in an upscale neighborhood; the kids paddling through fetid green water in the slums of Cite Soleil."

"This is a country where there is nostalgia for strong, even if bloody, leadership. Many Haitians cite the corrupt and murderous Duvalier regime as the best government in living memory."

As, no doubt, some in Jamaica long for Governor Eyre.

Utopia on a Dungheap

In a piece which reads like the Master Narrative for Hapless Haiti, Harding quotes, among others, Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State:

"Throughout history, people have fought for the right to vote. Some have indeed died for the right to vote. There is no more powerful weapon in the hands of a citizen than the vote. And so to the people of Haiti, I urge you to use that powerful weapon, the vote, in the days ahead."

Tell that to the Marines

In Harding's unintentional parody of the parachuted periodista, he stumbles across some truths: "In a country of eight million people, Haiti's paltry budget means that the next president will have about $100 to spend on each person, dispensed through a corrupt and incapable bureaucracy, not to mention a lawless and often violent police force."

He also quotes, without explaining his role in the chaos, Andy Apaid, "one of the country's wealthiest businessmen", who, according to Harding, says simply: "We are in a very, very serious hole."

As perhaps the chief hole-digger, one would have expected Apaid to have had more to say, and that Harding would have asked him more questions. Alas, we have to accept Mr Apaid's Delphic and no doubt, deeply significant utterance.

Harding says: "Even Juan Gabriel Valdes, the top United Nations official in Haiti, takes a fatalistic view of the presidential contest that the international community is working so hard to make happen: "We will have the election, but the country will not be very different the day after. What we would like is to build a consensus around the priorities."

The problem, of course, is that that was precisely what Jean-Bertrand Aristide was attempting to do when Apaid, Colin Powell and assorted murderers and rapists, assisted by the US Marines, put an end to Haiti's democratic experiment.

As I said, Harding does stumble across some truths. He even says something that I said ten years ago, that Haiti's problems can only be solved by long-term dedicated help, but Harding doesn't think Haitians are capable of being in charge of the process. Strangely, he ends his piece thus:

"Instead, it is to say that Haiti is a case for nation-building, not mere liberation. It is a task for a development-minded administration, not one single-mindedly focused on democracy. Another Haiti crisis will not be far off. It is in America's interests to be looking well beyond the election to the less newsworthy, less Manichaean business of road construction, power generation and clean water distribution. The priority is not freedom, it's the garbage."

Somebody must have lent him one of Aristide's books. Aristide spoke of the possibility of building 'Utopia upon a Dungheap', but he was sabotaged by the United States, France, and the European Union as well as by the International Financial institutions, the World Bank, the IMF and the ineffable Kofi Annan.

As I said earlier, I am convinced that it is Haiti's perceived moral superiority to her persecutors which is responsible for the mess. If they let Haitians do their own thing they may be in danger of exposing the truth: that people like us, Haitians, like the Cubans and the Venezuelans may actually expose the hollow pretensions of the 'civilised world'.

The Python that Exploded

2005-10-16T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

William Burroughs should be alive at this hour if only to savour the latest news about ganja - marijuana. Scientific experiments on rats indicate that the clinical use of marijuana could make people feel better by helping control anxiety and depression by promoting brain cell growth.

According to a report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, a synthetic chemical similar to the active ingredient in marijuana makes new cells grow in rat brains. What is more, in rats this cell growth appears to be linked with reducing anxiety and depression. The results suggest that marijuana, or its derivatives, could actually be good for the brain.

What will they think of next?

A report from the Florida Everglades sounds more like a parable than a true story, but it is a true story. It appears that Florida is becoming increasingly infested by Burmese pythons, sold by pet stores years ago to parents who either forgot, or never knew, Ogden Nash's celebrated 'couplet' about small animals:

"The trouble with a kitten is that
It very soon becomes a cat."

In the case of pythons there is no phase change, they just keep getting bigger and hungrier, and the adorable little wrigglers must soon be turned out to pasture, which, in Florida, means the Everglades. There, the pythons find their true destiny and continue growing until some natural or unnatural disaster puts an end to the process.

This week, a 13-foot python lost his lunch, fatally. The snake had overpowered a six-foot long alligator and was in the process of swallowing him whole when the alligator, still alive, began to try to claw his way out of the python. The messy result was an exploding python, still enveloping, in death, its saurian lunch.

I don't know why this story reminds me of what's been happening to the United States over the past several years, particularly in places like Cuba, Vietnam, Somalia, Venezuela and Iraq, to name a few. On Thursday, in Salamanca, Spain, the Ibero-American summit of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries unanimously called on the United States to give up its almost half-century-long war against Cuba - to end the blockade and to give up, to Venezuela, that felonious friend of the Bush family, 'Bambi' Posada Carriles.

Fidel Castro wasn't even at the summit, although he'd been invited. The Latins acted not on emotion, but on principle.

"We ask the US government to fulfil 13 successive resolutions approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations to put an end to the financial, commercial and economic blockade which it maintains against Cuba," the ministers said in a statement.

"We reaffirm once more in defence of the free exchange and transparent practice of international trade, that unilateral coercive measures which affect the welfare of people and obstruct integration processes are unacceptable," the ministers said.

Cuba says the blockade/embargo is an illegal act of war and has cost the Cuban people $82 billion in addition to the more conventional aggressions, terrorist attacks, deadly sabotage, biological warfare and the false imprisonment of five Cubans engaged in anti-terrorism intelligence work in Florida.

The Haitian people yet haven't calculated what the US owes them, but it must also be substantial. Their problem is slightly different from the Cubans' - the United States pretends that Haiti doesn't really exist and that its people are not really entitled to human rights.

Meanwhile, back in Washington's halls of justice the American python-in-chief, one Karl Rove, appears on the verge of a new career, defending himself in court against the charge that he conspired to break US law by 'outing' Valerie Plame, a CIA undercover officer, in an attempt to revenge the administration against the truth-telling of Ms Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Truth-telling is not among the strong points of the present administration. The administration has been condemned by the General Accounting Office of the US Congress for buying reporters and news coverage, in effect, using public money to distort public opinion. President Bush was at it again, last week.

This time the Looking Glass President was allegedly engaging in what Newsday says was "billed as a folksy question-and-answer session in which President George W Bush would talk to soldiers about their activities in Iraq and assure them of popular support".

The folksy chat turned out to be a rehearsed advertorial for the president, with American troops hauled from the battlegrounds to act as the president's 'straight men'. So, now the war effort includes using soldiers to support the Republican Party.

Some people appear to be shocked that Mr Bush should stoop so low as to arrange a kind of Potemkin fireside chat. After the disasters of Iraq, Katrina, DeLay, Rove/Judith Miller and the new SEC enquiry into the financial behaviour of the Majority Leader in the Senate, plus his guttering polls, I consider that the president has got to do what he has to do: defy reality hoping that someone will take notice.

We are watching the disintegration of the military industrial complex prefigured in the collapse of its public image. The edifice itself will take some time to disintegrate and collapse, but the facade is being blown off, strip by strip.

Blogging and press freedom

As recently as two years ago many of the stories which now show Bush and his backers for what they really are would never have been published, and if they had, would not have been noticed, or followed up.

But in the last two years new technology has freed up the press to the people: blogging software has enabled anyone to be a publisher, and in A J Liebling's words - "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one".

The blog has become the poor man's press and the public interest is alive and well in all sorts of quarters. The media, as McLuhan said, is becoming the message.

Seven years ago hundreds of blue-chip journalists, as I call them, were in Cuba to cover the philosophical heavyweight championship fight of the century between Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro.

These two represented, for the press, the champions of Light and Darkness, respectively. But the Drudge Report nixed all that. The Drudge Report is, I hear, a kind of drop box for journalists with stories they could not print, mainly for ethical reasons, but wanted published. Give it to Drudge and it would be printed with no troublesome questions of journalistic standards interfering.

When Drudge printed the blue-dress report, the blue-chip reporters took off from Cuba, a flight of starlings, pursued by an eagle. These days Drudge is outnumbered, outwritten and outflanked by thousands of ordinary people, including a sizeable presence of real journalists with real journalistic ethics. The quality, like the bloggers themselves, is uneven. But that does not matter.

As in any other kind of random sampling, given a large enough sample, statistical probability indicates that the result will be pretty much a reflection of the total population.

But there is another, very powerful factor - blogging is interactive, so that any given blog is constantly refreshed and corrected from time to time, by its readers/members. This is truly public opinion in action - informed public opinion - sometimes rude and rough, but generally rational, full of common sense and the courage to call a spade a spade.

Three years ago when the United States was preparing war in Iraq, millions of people round the world came out on the streets to register their disagreement. At that time, the New York Times described this demonstration of worldwide public opinion as "The Other Superpower".

The NYTspoke more truly than they knew. In the old days it took a great deal of money to set up a newspaper or a radio station. Eventually, it was the big money that controlled freedom of speech, freedom of expression; freedom of the press, as Liebling said, belonged to the owners.

Today, as the greed of the military/industrial/transnational complex is causing the world to overheat and melt the Arctic Ice cap, so is the power of the media owners melting like ice cream on a hot pavement.

The technology of cell phones, laptop and handheld computers, small hard drives combine to lower the cost of publishing, the power of the Time-Warners, the Disneys and the network news is also melting. They won't disappear for some time, but the introduction of the video IPod is bound to make as serious inroads into television as television made into magazines.

Podcasters will now be able to podcast their news videos or their mini-features. With the technology available on the basic Macintosh computer for audio and video editing, you can now change the world in your attic while you starve like a proper poet.

The new landscape will also mean that nation states and the bureaucracies which maintain them will become even less relevant since the political parties and electoral machines will no longer be able to control informed public opinion and Bush-league advertorials will be even less relevant, as, thankfully, will people like Karl Rove, George Bush and Judith Miller.

The pythons have bitten off much more than they can chew: as we say in jamaica, their eyes have always been bigger than their bellies. Some of the biggest bangs to come will be the sound of pythons exploding.

Truth is the Enemy

2005-10-09T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

All Hell is breaking loose in the corridors of power.

The United States Senate, reflecting the views of most civilised people, voted a few days ago 90 to nine to ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of anyone in US government custody". Even the Majority Leader in the Senate, Bill Frist, voted with the majority.

Earlier in the year he had succumbed to pressure from President Bush and the White House to stop the Senate passing such a measure. This time, he seems to have been overcome either by his finer feelings or by the poll figures.

Mr Bush, however, is unfazed. He has threatened to veto the Bill, a waste of time, because the 90 senators voting for it clearly have the votes to over-ride the veto.

So, Mr Bush has at last admitted what we all knew: the Lynndie England's and all the other poor soldiers who have been punished for torturing and mistreating their captives in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were in fact following orders. Mr Bush has now admitted as much. Which is more than Mr Milosevich, former president of Yugoslavia/Serbia, has admitted in his trial at the Hague for war crimes.

You will remember that Mr Milosevich was kidnapped from Serbia for trial in the Hague on charges that troops under his authority committed war crimes. There is no allegation that Milosevich authorised anyone to commit the crimes for which he is being tried.

Mr Bush, on the other hand, is curiously cavalier about his own behaviour, asserting that his troops need to be able to torture and mistreat their captives in order to get information.

This attitude may yet put Mr Bush in some danger, as two recent European court judgments defy his administration's contentions about the legality of their actions in Iraq. In January, an Italian judge, Clementine Forieo ruled that five North Africans accused of terrorism could not be so described because they were in reality resistance fighters against an illegal occupation force.

That judgment is supported more recently, by the German Federal Administrative Court which ruled that the attack launched by the US and its allies against the nation of Iraq was a clear war of aggression that violated international law - as specified in Article 4, Paragraph 4 of the UN Charter .

Both judgments are further supported by the Scandinavian legislators who form the jury for the Nobel Peace Prize. They awarded the Prize this year to Mr Mohammed Al Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Authority which he heads.

Mr El Baradei, it may be remembered, was one of those who discredited the Anglo-American claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium from Niger, one of the centrepieces of the case for war. The British PM, Mr Blair, had the grace to congratulate Mr El Baradei, but I suspect that Hell will freeze over before we get a similar concession from Mr Bush.

Life in Washington is becoming even more exciting, with many people speculating that the president's consigliere, Mr Rove, and the vice president's apparatchik-in-chief, Mr Libby, may be indicted quite soon for conspiring to leak the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA undercover agent who is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Mr Wilson - in the New York Times two years ago, exploded Mr Bush's claims about Iraq and Niger uranium. Valerie Plame's cover was blown by some creeps at the White House, in an effort to discredit Mr Wilson.

It is clear that in Washington and in other places of interest to Washington, the truth is an extremely dangerous commodity.
The head of Reuters news agency has complained to Senator John Warner, head of the Armed Forces Committee about the killing, maiming and illegal imprisonment of journalists and media employees by US forces in Iraq.

The Reuters chief, Mr David Schlesinger, said US troops were out of control and their attacks on media people were inhibiting the accurate reporting of the war in the public interest. In a letter to Sen Warner, he said US forces were limiting the ability of independent journalists to operate.

Mr Schlesinger called on Warner to raise widespread media concerns about the conduct of US troops with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was due to testify to the committee Schlesinger referred to "a long parade of disturbing incidents whereby professional journalists have been killed, wrongfully detained, and/or illegally abused by US forces in Iraq".

Schlesinger urged Warner to demand that Rumsfeld resolve these issues "in a way that best balances the legitimate security interests of the US forces in Iraq and the equally legitimate rights of journalists in conflict zones under international law".

At least 66 journalists and media workers, most of them Iraqis, have been killed in the Iraq conflict since March 2003 at least 13 of them by US troops. The most notorious case was the bombing of the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad in March 2003.

In a letter to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the time, the Committee to Protect Journalists noted that, "the attack against Al-Jazeera is of particular concern since the station's offices were also hit in Kabul, Afghanistan, in November 2001". The Pentagon asserted, without providing additional detail, that the office was a "known Al-Qaeda facility" and that "the US military did not know the space was being used by Al-Jazeera", which was palpably untrue.

Then there was the shelling of the Hotel Palestine by an American tank. The shells were directed at the upper floors of the hotel, in response, the US Army said, to insurgents firing from the lobby on the ground floor of the hotel.

Now, journalists and other media people are being selected for arrest and detention by US troops, without any recourse to law. According to Reuters the US military has refused to conduct independent and transparent investigations into the deaths of the journalists, relying instead on inquiries by officers from the units responsible, who had exonerated their soldiers.

The US military has failed even to implement recommendations by its own inquiry into one of the deaths, that of award-winning Palestinian cameraman Mazen Dana who was shot dead while filming outside Abu Ghraib prison in August 2003.

Schlesinger said Reuters and other reputable international news organisations were concerned by the "sizeable and rapidly increasing number of journalists detained by US forces".

He said most of these detentions had been provoked by legitimate journalistic activity such as possessing photographs and video of insurgents, which US soldiers assumed showed sympathy with the insurgency.

In most cases the journalists were held for long periods at Abu Ghraib or Camp Bucca prisons before being released without charge. It isn't only in Iraq that journalists are being targeted. In Spain a senior Al Jazeera journalists, Taysir Alluni, has been given a long jail term essentially for the crime of having interviewed Osama Bin Laden after the September 11 atrocities. There was, according to all the news reports I have read, no credible evidence against him, although he was accused of ferrying money to people on behalf of Al Qaeda.

The Arab Human Rights League believes that Alluni is a sacrifice to the American, British and Israeli interests attempting to justify their war against 'terror'. Alluni was first arrested in September 2003, but was was later released on bail on health grounds -he suffers from a weak heart and back problems - only to be arrested again and jailed in Madrid in November 2004.

He was released to house arrest in March, but taken back into custody on 16 September and is now to serve seven years in prison. A few weeks ago, Robert Fisk, the distinguished Middle East correspondent of the (London) Independent was refused entry to the United States for a lecture tour, as was Ian McEuan 18 months earlier.

McEuan later received an apology from the US department of Homeland Security. As far as I know, neither Fisk, nor our own Wayne Brown has received any similar expression of regret for their treatment. Since I was warned more than two years ago not to push my luck I was unable to attend my sister's funeral, for fear that mine might follow in the not too distant future.

In Haiti, journalists are being beaten and murdered by forces under the influence of the United States and the UN mission. Guyler Delvas, president of the journalist's association, (who has been on Jamaica radio several times) was arrested and beaten by the presidential security guard (Americans) last week as was another journalist with him, Radio Metropole reporter Jean Wilkens Merone.

They were covering a ceremony marking the beginning of the judicial year. Both journalists reported serious injuries after being dragged inside the courthouse and then severely beaten.

On September 9, journalists Jean Ristil and Kevin Pina were arrested while monitoring a search warrant at Rev Fr Gerard Jean-Juste's church in the Delmas district.

On July 10, journalist Jacques Roche was kidnapped and subsequently tortured and murdered by his assailants. On April 7, reporter Robenson Laraque died from injuries suffered while observing a clash between UN troops and members of the disbanded Haitian military in the city of Petit-Goâve.

On January 14, radio reporter Abdias Jean was murdered while covering a police operation and raid in the Village de Dieu sector of Port-au-Prince.

The Wages of Terrorism

If coming events cast their shadows, what are we to make of an incident at the British Labour Party conference two weeks ago? An 85-year-old man, Walter Wolfgang, who has lived in the UK since fleeing the wrath of Hitler nearly 70 years ago, dared to shout "Nonsense" during the speech of Home Secretary Jack Straw.

Not only was Wolfgang bundled out, roughly and unceremoniously, but another man who protested his brutal treatment was also frog-marched out of the conference.

The ensuing press uproar produced apologies from Prime Minister Blair and other notables. Wolfgang and his supporter were both allowed back into the conference on promises of good behaviour. But not before Wolfgang was arrested and charged under Britain's Anti-Terrorism act.

I promise you, I am not making this up. Heckling is terrorism.

Presumably Wolfgang fell under the section of the Act which sanctions the 'glorification' of terrorism.

I am being serious, because Mr Bush has joined Mr Blair in redefining their enemies, and it appears that anyone who dares make any protest will be classified as a member of the new international Islamo-fascist ideology as defined by Mr Bush.

And if you think that you can seek refuge in the law, think again. The woman who does Mr Bush's legal housekeeping, Mrs Harriet Miers, has been nominated by the president to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the US Supreme Court.

And, being from Texas, she may also be a good friend of Mr DeLay and those others who wish to redefine government until it becomes a dish rag for capitalists. Mrs Miers has never, ever, sat as a judge anywhere.

Can you imagine a British or a Jamaican prime minister making a similar appointment? Can you imagine the outrage?
Anyway, Caligula did make his horse a consul.So there is precedent. As Mr Al Gore has said, the current public discourse in the United States is indeed strange.

Dreadful things are happening but the body politic is silent. They must be, if the people who are supposed to inform them, the media, are too rich or bored, or just too cowardly to care

There have been editorials welcoming the Senate's proposed ban on torture, but where were these worthies when the torture was being discussed? Well, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and the noted (liberal) legal authority, Alan Dershowitz, to name just two, were both publicly recommending the use of torture at the time.
And no one said a word.

Open Letter to Kofi Annan

2005-10-02T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Your Excellency,
You are by far the most experienced, accomplished and skilful secretary-general the United Nations has ever had. I do not say this to butter you up, but to give my readers an idea of who you are.You are uniquely among secretaries-general, a child of the United Nations, for which you began working 43 years ago.

Since then you have worked in almost every possible capacity - in senior positions in Human Relations, Refugee Relief, Emergency Management, Peacekeeping and in Management and Finance. You know the organisation inside out, and you know better than anyone else in the world, what the UN can do and what it can't.

In the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations the founding members declared, inter alia: that the organisation was an instrument:

"...to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples ."

It is this charter and the subsequent Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which persuades millions of poor and powerless people all over the world, that the United Nations is their best hope for freedom, justice and fair treatment, their Court of Last Resort.

Many of us, myself included, marched and demonstrated aginst the decision of the US and Britain to attack Iraq. We considered the invasion and war to be illegal. Almost exactly one year ago, in September 2004, you told a BBC reporter in London, "From our point of view and the UN charter point of view, it was illegal."

You, too, had been opposed to the invasion from the start because as you said, the initiative lacked Security Council approval as required by the UN charter, and you challenged the White House claims that the war had made the world safer from international terrorists.

I, however, and some others fault you for withdrawing the UN Inspection teams which action we believe, facilitated the invasion. The world has now been given ample proof, if it needed any, that the true objectives of the war were not as advertised, but were purely Great Power aggrandisement.

My concern is not about Iraq, however, it is about something much closer home. When the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 it was following, by 244 years, another declaration of universal human rights for the first time anywhere in the world nearly two centuries earlier.

That declaration was in Haiti where slaves destroyed not only the institution of slavery, but three major European armies sent to force them back into subjection.

Supporters of the ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide take to the streets

In pursuit of their vision, the Haitians also armed and provisioned Simon Bolivar, the liberator-to-be of South America, when he was bankrupt, friendless and disheartened. The Haitians asked in return, only that Bolivar should free slaves anywhere he found them.

This spirit of internationalist altruism has not been duplicated by any other country, as far as I know, except in the cases of Tanzania and Cuba who directly intervened to destroy dictatorships in Uganda and Southern Africa, respectively.

Yet, despite their noble behaviour and their centuries struggle for freedom, the people of Haiti are this day under an oppression more onerous and unreasonable and absolute than slavery itself. At least, on the plantations the slaves were fed and had the freedom to cultivate their own grounds.

Today, as I speak, an alien armed force from many countries is in Haiti, providing protection cover and firepower in aid of the remnants of the most savage and barbaric regime in the history of the western hemisphere. It is not that others may not have murdered more, but the scale of the butchery and brutality of the Duvalier regimes and those dictatorships succeeding are in a class by themselves.

This alien armed force is in Haiti under the auspices, we are told, of the UN Security Council, two permanent members of which, aided by another northern power, sponsored, organised and controlled the armed kidnapping and overthrow of the lawfully elected president and government of Haiti.

Two days before this letter appears in print, people in many countries will have marched in solidarity with Haiti, commemorating the first occasion in which the forces of reaction overthrew the first freely elected government of Haiti in a hundred years.

Last year, had they been allowed, the Haitian people would have - under the auspices of the very United Nations you serve, celebrated their magnificent triumph of liberty over tyranny and freedom over slavery.

Instead, you did not attend the original day of celebration (you were apparently on holiday on the Jamaican north coast 300 miles away) and shortly thereafter, shrouded by a pungent smog of lies, obfuscation, chicanery and duplicity, the United States and its accomplices destroyed Haitian democracy for the second time in 12 years.

Their president, twice elected by overwhelming majorities as attested by the United Nations and the United States among others, with a more secure claim to legitimacy than the president who deposed him, was sent, labelled as cargo, with his family into shameful exile to our ancestral homeland- to a republic which has been more brutally abused than most by its colonial masters. It was hoped, no doubt, that the president and the Haitian people and the rest of the world would have accepted this reverse Middle Passage.

It was selfless altruism by a number of concerned Americans which rescued President Aristide and brought him to Jamaica where he remained for some time. Here, in this country, which probably more than most owes its freedom to Haiti, some of us, out of profound ignorance promoted by massive propaganda, did not make him as welcome as we should have. But that is a small matter.

What has utterly perplexed many of us is that you, as the court of last resort for the hungry, the oppressed and the suffering of this world, did not act to rescue the Haitian people from their oppressors, but, instead, sadly and unfortunately, appeared to connive in their further debasement and disfranchisement, in the most evil denial of the fundamental human rights they alone proclaimed two centuries ago.

You, more than anyone on this planet, should know the insides of the programmes to subvert freedom, planned and executed by a faceless collection of managers who have usurped their own capitalist enterprises, taken control away from their shareholders and stolen the pensions of their workers, and having made themselves richer than any Rockefeller could have imagined a century ago, are now proceeding to wage war on the world, to reduce by the process of globalisation, intimidation and war the rest of us to a state of abject dependence in sweated labour without justice or mercy.

Your plan to reform the United Nations has been subverted by the state representatives of these thugs, some of whom are even now under indictment and or criminal investigation in their own countries. It is a plan which you first proposed in 1997 and represents the work and hopes of most of the world's peoples, but it is at this very moment being sabotaged and undermined by political termites and deathwatch beetles which are intent on returning most of us to the Dark Ages, gated and fenced away from their rapturous bell-curved paradise.

Mr John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, has said:

"There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is the United States, when it suits our interest and when we can get others to go along. And I think it would be a real mistake to count on the UN as if it is some disembodied entity out there that can function on its own."- Global Structures Convocation, Feb 3, 1994.

He has said more and worse, but there is no need to explore further what passes for his mind.

Another of these conscienceless brutes, one Bill O'Reilly, said that when Mr Bush spoke two weeks ago at the UN about combatting terrorism ". I'm sure all the UN people fell asleep. They don't really care about anything over there at all. I just wish Katrina had only hit the United Nations building, nothing else, just had flooded them out. And I wouldn't have rescued them."

The racism, prejudice and ignorance of these boobies are obvious to most of the world, and in the United States the majority have recovered from the hypnotic trance in which they have been immured for the last several years.

You, Kofi Annan, know better than anyone, that globalisation is a primitive commercial reaction to the UN's Agenda 21, because the aim of Agenda 21 was the eradication of poverty by sustainable development. The intent is explicit: it was Enron, that once admired and now discredited and derided Ponzi scheme, which was given the duty of writing the General Agreement on Trade in Services, the crucial part of the globalisation impoverishment process.

But these yahoos are on the run; their elaborately constructed mirages are falling apart, the law is catching up with some of them and will catch up with more.

The second most powerful man in the US, House leader Tom DeLay is under indictment for criminal misuse of funds. Two of DeLay's associates, Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, are being investigated by at least five federal agencies for wholesale bribery, extortion, fraud and corruption generally; and three associates of Abramoff - Florida 'businessmen' - were last week charged with murder.

Meanwhile, in Haiti, enveloped in an aura of sanctimony, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice was busy advising the 'government' she helped invent, about the need for better PR: they're locking up too many leaders of the Haitian people prior to their so-called 'election'.

We - you, the Haitian people, the Jamaican people and I all share the same ancestry and the Haitians' ancestors performed deeds that no one else had ever done; their spirits walk uneasily over the lands fertilised by their bones and blood.

Their spirits need peace, Kofi, and you can give it to them by giving their descendants the rights and dignities to which they are entitled and for which they have suffered, struggled and fought so hard for so long.

Yours sincerely,
John Maxwell

That UWI patty shop

The university authorities have published an 'explanation" of their decision to site a patty shop at the state entrance to the university. According to a release, the patty shop has been three years in gestation and has the approval of the KSAC.

My questions are; Does it have planning permission from NEPA? Were Jamaica's partners in the UWI consulted? Was the project put out to tender? What revenue will the UWI derive? Doesn't the UWI realise that under GATS it has now opened all its prime green spaces to commercial exploitation? Is a supermarket scheduled for the Chapel grounds?

No Way Out?

2005-09-25T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Many, many years ago, when I was a teenager at high school, the local cinema mogul would once or twice a term lend the school a projector and a feature film which had been shown everywhere else. This time the projector worked but the sound didn't. The film was "Whispering Smith", a western epic, starring Alan ladd, then at the height of his stardom, a tough, no-nonsense cowboy.

Unfortunately, without sound, unable even to whisper, bereft of voice, Alan Ladd came across as an animated dummy, running the gamut of emotions from A to B, as I think Dorothy Parker once said. It was all gesture, mechanical: smile, frown, look quizzical; frown again etc etc.
I began to laugh and my fellows, to whom Alan Ladd was a genuine hero, looked at me quizzically.

Alan Ladd raised his eyebrows; I raised mine; he smiled, grimly; so did I; he looked quizzical; so did I. Pretty soon the guys beside me began to laugh and soon the whole school was enjoying an uproarious silent comedy which was meant to be deadly serious.

Later I discovered that Alan Ladd was so short that he had to stand on boxes to kiss his leading ladies. George Bush reminds me of Alan Ladd. And if you turn off his sound you will see why. It is all gesture, no heart.

NO WAY OUT

The headline above is taken from an AP report out of Houston on Friday: 'No Way Out: Many Poor Stuck in Houston'.
The Cubans do it better.

In the the last five years, the Cubans have moved six million people "equivalent to half their population" in response to hurricane threats. According to Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency, "Most people find refuge in institutions prepared by the Civil Defence System or in houses of relatives and neighbours; part of the spontaneous solidarity of the Cuban people.

In September 2004 alone, over two-and-a-quarter-million people were evacuated before Hurricane Ivan, which reached category five. As a result of precautions taken by the Cuban Civil Defence, the most effective in the world, there were no human losses; something considered amazing in the world, but customary in Cuba."

When they are threatened by a hurricane, every Cuban knows what to do. Every family knows where they are going and how they are getting there. During Hurricane Dennis there were 16 people killed in Cuba, because they had refused to move and hid themselves from the neighbourhood committees which are responsible for such matters.

Those were the first deaths from a hurricane in Cuba for a very long time. The Cubans are in the direct path of hurricanes and when a hurricane's position and direction are known, every man, woman, child and animal is moved to safety.

The entire Cuban people were extremely upset at the deaths from Dennis. It was all so unneccessary, they say.
For Rita there were no reports of casualties, neither dead nor injured last week when almost 238,000 people were evacuated to safe shelters. Nearly 60,000 students from boarding schools (junior high and high) were taken to evacuation centres and their schools secured. Thousands of tourists in Key Coco and Varadero were also transfered to safety.

Cuba is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a national income below that of Jamaica or the Dominican republic. That is, according to how you measure national welfare.
The United States is one of the richest countries in the world and has more millionaires than Barbados has people.

When Hurricane Rita strikes this weekend I pray that no one will die, but I am not at all confident. Rita battered northern Cuba last week but no one died. In Texas 24 people died on Friday when a bus filled with elderly and sick evacuees caught fire.

Roads were jammed and some people were reported stuck for more than half a day trying to get out of Houston.
In some ways the United States resembles Jamaica. Here too, we wait until the last minute to make preparations for events we know are sure to happen.

GOING BANANAS

Jamaica is still trying to get special treatment from the European community for its bananas and sugar, both lost causes 40 years ago, as far as I was concerned. There are, and were, alternatives, but we will not consider them. The reason: if we transform food production in Jamaica into a real agricultural pursuit and not a factory system, we will have to redistribute land, give power to the people and make life less profitable for the coupon clippers.

If we transform agriculture and begin to eat what we produce and produce more of what we eat we will be free from the threat of globalisation, from the threat of being non-competitive beggars and slaves to foreign capital. We will not need to borrow from the international financial institutions.

The crime rate will fall because we will need to educate our children and take better care of them.

We depend on a system which depends on exploitation of the presence of a fluid, volatile reservoir of unemployed whose function is to keep wages down. Full employment means that everyone will have to work for his living. We can't have that.

Somehow, they have it in Cuba. The Cubans operate what the western press reports to be an antiquated, discredited collectivist system which by definition cannot work. Three weeks ago, this dilapidated economy offered to send 1,600 trained emergency doctors to the United states, an offer which was refused.

One wonders if one of them was on that bus in Houston if it would have caught fire in the first place. Last week the Cubans decided to organise an international brigade from those volunteer doctors, ready to go anywhere to help anyone in trouble.

There are thousands of Cuban doctors all over the world, thousands in Africa, thousands in Venezuela, hundreds in Haiti, treating sick poor people.

There must be something wrong with such a system!!
Last week the Cuban president announced that Cuba is well on the way to achieving the lowest infant mortality rate in the hemisphere, below four per thousand births, even better than Canada, he said. He was addressing a graduation ceremony for 1,903 physicians from the island's medical schools.

In addition, Castro announced that Cuba's life expectancy will be highest in the hemisphere. That advance will take place in half the time it took Switzerland and Japan to raise their life expectancies from 70 to 80 years. In Cuba life expectancy is at 77.5 years.

The president noted that medical services in Cuba have increased life expectancy by 18 years from the 60 years at the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

CARIBBEAN PARADOX

Next door to Cuba is Haiti, another of the world's poorest countries, run, like Jamaica, on laissez-faire principles, so laissez -aire, in fact, that the country is not being run by its own people but by a clique put in power by the United States.

The invasion of Haiti and the coup against President Aristide were one of Mr Bush's most ambitious experiments in spreading "freedom". It was done because they thought Aristide would turn into "another Fidel Castro".

To do that, he decapitated Haitian democracy and deposed a president who, unlike him, won the votes and loyalty of an overwhelming majority of his people.

In order to democratise Haiti, the United States, aided and abetted by France, Canada and the Security Council of the United Nations has imposed an oligarchy in Haiti which rules by terror, confident of the approval of the 'civilised' world.

Convicted murderers have been let loose and pardoned and one is about to run for president in a mock election under the auspices, of the so-called United Nations. They are confident that the odd dozen rapes, beatings and occasional massacres will pass unnoticed by the western press, those stalwart defenders of freedom and human rights. They can securely mistreat Haitian women, paying them starvation wages and sterilising them against their will to maintain a disciplined workforce.

This Haitian election is especially significant when one remembers the pious speeches of George Bush and Kofi Annan two weeks ago at the UN summit when they both regretted the advance of terrorism and the decline of democracy in the world.
But all is well.

It is the gesture that is important, not the action. As we watch Mr Bush quizzically raise his eyebrows, wisely frown, sagaciously clench his lips and resolutely point his finger, we know that he is a very serious man, just like Whispering Smith. And we know that his speech was written by an accomplished acolyte of George Orwell, that prophet of newspeak and globalisation.

To safeguard democracy and make assurance doubly sure, in Haiti Messrs Annan (black) and Mr Bush (white) have jointly conceived a multiracial solution, that is sure to get world approval, to the problem of Haitian democracy. Simply announce an election, call for candidates for the election and when they present themselves, lock them up.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of the times, especially of the New York Times, I consider it opportune to write a piece 'in the manner of George Orwell' honouring Western journalism. It will be called: "Homage to Catatonia", and they should all be pleased whenever they awake from their slumbers, five, 10 or 50 years from now.

Meanwhile, we in Jamaica have not been slow in making our marks in the annals of confusion and misfeasance. Some items:
The latest friend of Patterson (FOP), Mr Cartade, is busily spreading his idea of freedom to settlements outside of his Long Mountain gated community.

Having already destroyed a precious pre-Colombian Taino archaeological site and laid waste to a biodiversity hotspot in which there was at least one plant not found anywhere else in the world, Mr Cartade is now happily pumping human excrement onto the lawns and gardens, the roads and footpaths of the Pines of Karachi.

He probably thinks they need manure, and like any nascent politician, he is giving them more than they ever thought they needed.

The minister of finance, now challenging for the prime minister's job, has quietly annexed part of National Heroes' Park for that sublime amenity of civilised life, a car park.

The University of the West Indies, not to be outdone, is busily constructing a patty shop at the intersection of its Queen's Drive and Ring Road.

Soon, invoking GATS, Burger King, MacDonalds and Taco Bell will demand 'national treatment' and Jamaican civilisation will finally come to full flower at the centre of Caribbean intellectual life, complete with the majestic backdrop of the Blue Mountains. This backdrop was once considered so sacred, in fact, that not even fences were to be placed in the sightlines.All we will need is a stall at the main gate selling cowskin soup.

Times change, they say 'tempus fugit' and I am become a fugitive from civilisation.

So Poor! 'So Black!'

2005-09-11T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

'So Poor!' he said in wonderment. CNN's Wolf Blitzer was looking at some of the victims of Katrina, rudely uprooted from their Third World existence in New Orleans by the hurricane. They were, of course outside his experience.

For Wolf Blitzer and most other American journalists, American poverty is a whole other country and so, white American journalists are as bemused as the rest of the world, looking on in stupefied disbelief as they are exposed to the reality of the American underclass.

On Thursday, a group of more than a hundred Jamaicans returned to Jamaica from jobs on the US Gulf coast. They were ordinary workers, hotel maids, bellhops and the like, with no particularly rare skills. They've been working in the US because American hotels can't find American workers to do these jobs.

They can't find them because Americans, no matter how poor, refuse to work for the kind of pay Jamaicans will willingly accept. The American workers are, in the words of the globalisers, not competitive.

To make them competitive the United States has for generations relied on imported labour, mainly illegal immigrants and some others who go to the United States with the full knowledge and complicity of the American authorities to work for American capitalists.

Foreign workers, like this Jamaican woman, take low-paying jobs which most Americans won't accept.

How can we compete, the capitalists ask piteously, against the production of peasants in faraway countries, impressed into industrial labour forces by agents of other American capitalists?

Obeying the imperatives of capitalism, Americans have been outsourcing production for a very long time, but the movement has accelerated into a stampede within the last 10 years. These days, only China is competitive.

Originally, the equation was simple. Industrialised countries 'bought' primary products from former colonies and sold them at grossly inflated prices to their own markets and to the people they had bought the stuff from in the first place. But as countries like Jamaica developed on the 'Puerto Rican' model and others developed on the Japanese model, profits began to be shaved and markets began to be overloaded.

In the Far East where colonialism had not managed to do too much damage, people retained their cultures, their language and most of their ancient skills. The Chinese, who invented gunpowder, were producing steel in backyard furnaces in the 1960s.

The Japanese, who had built the world's largest and most advanced battleship, the Yamato, 70 years ago, had to endure the fairly benign occupation of the American military after having been atom-bombed into subjection.

But they got to keep their emperor and they got something infinitely more valuable, enormous amounts of military investment which helped fuel a new growth of industrialisation. The same thing happened in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and the effect spilled over into other southeast Asian countries. Europeans got the Marshall Plan.

Starting from a different level than Americans, these people soon began to produce and outproduce Americans particularly in electronics and motor vehicles.

In Africa, where whole civilisations and cultures had been uprooted and obliterated, and in the former American colonies of the European powers, life was different.

One major reason was the colour of the skins of the people. For 500 years, in order to justify slavery, the world was told that blacks were shiftless, work-shy and undisciplined. They had to be forced to work 'for their own good, you understand; they needed slavery'.

That excuse allowed King Leopold to enslave the Congo, long after slavery was 'abolished' and the British, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish to enforce similar forms of superprofit-extraction in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. In Latin America there were lots of blacks, but the population majorities there weren't black; they were, as the writer Inga Muscio was once described, simply 'less than white'.

Within the United States itself the promised Reconstruction after slavery swiftly degenerated into white reaction and re-enslavement under another name. The intensely religious Americans emulated the ecclesiastics of the 12th century. Instead of figuring how many angels could dance on the head of a pin they were calculating how many Anglos could dance on the head of a peon.

Blacks in the Americas have always been ambivalent about their prospects on this side of the Atlantic. There were and are those who, like Martin Luther King, figured that their blood and suffering had bought them rights. There were the others, like Marcus Garvey and the 'Black Muslims' who believed that for blacks there was no white man's justice that would ever encompass them.

Being black in America is not quite as dangerous as being openly homosexual in Jamaica, but it is close enough. A black man in the Bronx today has a lower life expectancy than a Bangladeshi of the same age.

Nearly 50 years ago, on my first visit to the United States I was challenged by a black shoemaker in Washington DC, literally within the shadow of the Capitol.

He was puzzled by my accent and wanted to know where I came from.
When I told him he asked me:
"They got anybody like me where you come from?"
I didn't understand him. Yes, they had shoemakers in Jamaica, I said.
No man. "They got any niggers there?"

I was totally flabbergasted. He and I could easily have been blood brothers; our hair was the same, our skin colour was the same. if anything he was a shade or two lighter-skinned than I. We even looked a little bit alike, I thought.

We settled the historical and ethnic questions over a pitcher of beer in a nearby bar. Why, I asked him, didn't he think I was a nigger? "Because you don't talk like a nigger, man, and you don't walk like a nigger."

New Orleans was in one way, a swinging, cosmopolitan city, world city, multicultural, multi-ethnic, in which 'black culture' was the defining flavour. But New Orleans was cross-dressing.

It was also an archetypical Southern US city, a kind of human zoo or theme park in which the majority of the population were allowed to flourish as long as they were of good behaviour. Beneath the export-only black culture there was another layer of black poverty and misery, largely invisible to the Blitzers and the kibitzers.

Apart from being so poor and so black, the Afro American minority is also dismissed as criminal and diseased. In the name of law and order, about half a million blacks are currently warehoused in prisons which are real universities of crime. The American black prison population is larger than the total prison population of any country, other than perhaps China.

Almost one-third of young black American men are either in jail or under some sort of custodial supervision, because the laws of the United States, as exemplified by persons such as Rehnquist, Jesse Helms, and the media, believe that blacks prefer a life of crime to fulfilling the American dream.

As Herrnstein and Murray say in The Bell Curve: "Clearly something about getting seriously involved in crime competes with staying in school."

The Bell Curve, accepted as making sense by an overwhelming cross section of the US media, postulates a "Custodial state", a high tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservations for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its busines.

Herrnstein and Murray say that such a state "will not only be tolerated but actively supported by a consensus of the cognitive elite" and they claim that they are not really theorising but reporting.

Instead of a custodial state, Herrnstein and Murray suggest "cognitive partitioning", supported by a return to Individualism. That is, the cognitive elite will formally continue to select out its Colin Powells, Condoleezza Rices and Clarence Thomases (but definitely not Serena Williams) to serve them, as Harry Belafonte described Powell, as house slaves.

The problem is not ethnic, although ethnicity is involved. The Central Europeans, who are the largest ethnic group in the United States outside of Hispanics, have always had their Serbs, Slavs and Gypsies (Egyptians) to hew wood and draw water. To that perhaps we should add the Irish, until they were all supplanted by the blacks.

The ethnic discrimination is not simply ethnic, but a convenient way to classify an economic underclass because so many wear an instantly recognisable uniform.

It tends to be forgotten that blacks are only a part of the American underclass. Their white compatriots are usually ignored, as if they are simply passing through a phase.

But since many become visible because of their homelessness, or joblessness or some dysfunctionality which makes them stand out, all of these characteristics are passed on to other poor people, particularly to blacks.

Black is black and white is white and never shall the twain mate. That, at least, is the theory of Hollywood and of much of the media so that it is now part of the Hollywood myth-complex.

The rest of the world looks strangely at an America in which "Guess who's coming to dinner", after 40 years, is still as far as Hollywood is prepared to go with the idea of 'inter-racial' sex, as if the mating of white and black were as experimental as the mating of gorillas and chimpanzees.

The result is someone like O J Simpson who, having been acquitted of murder, was still found guilty, essentially of marrying a white woman. While no one can explain how Simpson could have sanitised himself and his house in the hour or so between the murders and his journey to Chicago, most white Americans thought he should pay damages to the families of his murdered wife and her friend. Newsweek made the point: O J tried to live like a white man. "He even played golf."

TIME magazine confessed to painting him blacker than he was, just as they did to Hugo Chavez, no doubt for good and sufficient reason.

When, 40 years ago, the actress Kim Novak was rumoured to be having an affair with Sammy Davis Jr, it more or less meant the end of her career. 'Inter-racial' mating is seen by the media as terminally dangerous not just to the morals of their audiences, but more dangerously, to the economics of the US.

There can be no miscegenation without representation, and where would that leave the working class? Barbara Bush had it right. Refugees in Texas MUST be better off than at home in New Orleans. And more sanitary to boot.

Meanwhile, if one examines the real USA, away from the ersatz gentility of the media, one discovers that not only are the really poor getting poorer, but the middle class is going nowhere at all. The middle classes are almost exactly where they were thirty years ago, in real economic terms.

The rich have become immeasurably wealthier and the poor destitute and hopeless. If social peace is to be maintained, globalisation must provide the answer: that means providing cheaper and cheaper goods to disguise the static economic position of the majority of Americans.

That requires not only a real Third World outside the boundaries of the United States; it also requires one within as well.

Losing New Orleans

2005-09-04T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

New Orleans was , I'm told, a place of myth and magic - a place where moral, ethnic and social certitudes evaporated, where the only reality was the city itself.

It was a world city, a place apart from the United States. embedded in it, but breathing an atmosphere richly distilled by centuries of separation from the mainstream of the Protestant, puritan, Anglo-Saxon United States, It was a place of French and Caribbean and black culture, history and folklore. It was the American interface with the third world,

Last week, we lost New Orleans. At least the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, thinks we should lose New Orleans. It's not worth rebuilding, he said; it should be bulldozed.

Even if he's wrong, the old New Orleans is gone.

Even the Louis Armstrong International Airport was under water, along with thousands of houses and the people who lived in them. Most were simply too poor to escape Hurricane Katrina, inevitable victims of a disaster long foretold, predicted and expected.

According to Professor Paul Krugman in the New York Times, before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America:

a terrorist attack on New York;
a major earthquake in San Francisco; and
a hurricane strike on New Orleans.

"The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all."
It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.

The New York Times quotes Eric Tolbert, formerly a top official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). According to Tolbert, FEMA officials, having just returned from helping in last December's Tsunami relief, drew up a list of probable disasters in the United States: "New Orleans was the No. 1 disaster we were talking about. We were obsessed with New Orleans because of the risk." But FEMA and all the other agencies of the US government were caught flatfooted by Hurricane Katrina.

It wasn't because they hadn't drawn up plans, or because they hadn't rehearsed what they would do in case their fears came to pass. It was because the federal government had down-sized FEMA and had, over the last five years, refused to heed New Orleans' pleas for money to defend the city against exactly such a natural disaster.

The National Guard, which would have been among the first responders, is largely in Iraq, fighting a war they were not meant to.

Disasters have many layers. Physical destruction and the consequent disruptions are one part. There are also the psychological, social, political and economic disruptions which follow. Natural disasters become catastrophes when human beings don't act intelligently or in time.

Twenty-five years ago, when Hurricane Allen seemed headed for Jamaica's south coast and specifically for Portmore, I was one of a group which convinced the prime minister to come to our assistance in an emergency movement of about 50,000 people from low-lying Portmore within about 14 hours.

At the time, we were in the throes of planning what later became the Office of Disaster Preparedness . Most of what we managed to do was seat of the pants improvisation. But had the hurricane struck Portmore, we would have saved the lives of thousands of people.

New Orleans had much more warning and many thousands were evacuated. But many of the people in New Orleans were too poor to arrange their own evacuation. They stayed behind because no one had thought to prepare for their problems.

But the catastrophe now developing in New Orleans has been years in the making and most of it is directly attributable to the idea that man can tame nature and that 'development' consists in putting down capital intensive works without considering other factors, like the weather, the geography and geology and most of all, the people.

The point of sustainable development is to increase economic prosperity while making sure that the benefits gained do not get wiped out by foreseeable hazards. In New Orleans, greed and capital prevailed over common sense.

When New Orleans was first settled nearly three centuries ago, the land on which it was built was 10 feet above sea level.
Today it is about 10 feet below. The reasons are fairly simple.

The city is built on land formed by the Mississippi river, part of its delta and like Portmore, (on the Rio Cobre delta) much of it is underlain by peat which is infinitely compressible.

When water is abstracted from peat, the land above it sinks. Further, the federal government in an attempt to tame the Mississippi, has tried to force it to behave like a gully, constructing, restricting and redirecting its flow so that the river no longer nourishes the watertable underneath the city as it did when the city was younger and sat more lightly on its foundations.

Beyond the physical disaster is the human calamity. The US Congress is giving express passage to a bill providing more than US$10 billion for emergency relief, about twice as much as ha been requested to shore up the defences of New Orleans and, possibly, moderate the effects of what is now estimated to be a $28 billion disaster.

Meanwhile, the people on the ground in New Orleans are angry, the officials as well as the ordinary citizens. Law and order no longer exists as desperate people take the law into their own hands to ensure their own survival.

On Thursday night the citys mayor, Roy Nagin told a television interviewer: "I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. This is a national disaster. This is a major, major, major deal. And I can't emphasise it enough. It's awful down here, man."

Of President Bush he said: "We have an incredible crisis here and his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice. Excuse my French everybody in America - but I am pissed." New Orleans' emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert called the situation a national disgrace. "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

New Orleans is the largest area of disaster, but there are others scattered through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Stories abound of people waiting in miles-long lines for hours for gasoline, water or ice.

Worse were the stories from the Superdome, which has been sheltering thousands of people driven from their homes: people dying, women and children being raped, and outside, human bodies rotting on the flooded streets. Four days after the disaster there was no organised assistance available.

The psychological toll will be enormous. In places like Jamaica more accustomed to natural calamities, people may be a little more tolerant of official delay. But in the United States where food comes out of a supermarket or a take-out restaurant, life is more complicated.

The poorer you are, the more complicated it gets. And in New Orleans and Biloxi and most of the affected areas, the poor, the ones left behind, are overwhelmingly black. In neighbouring Mississippi black people earn half as much as white people.

Race is becoming the fulcrum for criticism of the government. The Rev Jesse Jackson said cities had been dismissed by the Bush administration because Mr Bush received few urban votes.

"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response. I'm not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have many poor people without a way out."

A vignette: Two photographs; one from Associated Press captioned: 'A young man walks through waist deep water after looting a grocery store', the other from Agence France Presse: 'Two residents walk through waist deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store'. The AP photo was of a black man.

The authorities have agreed on a shoot-to-kill policy against looters. Mr Bush approves. He condemned looting and profiteering yesterday. It is not known whether profiteers will be shot.

Professor Krugman suggests that "at a fundamental level our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures".

Yesterday Mr Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

Europeans have been stunned by the America revealed by Katrina. Suddenly, the hurricane has blown away the facade of Hollywood, CNN and McDonalds and revealed an America, in living colour and dire destitution, which they had never imagined.

Others outside of the United States watch in fascinated horror, as things fall apart in the country whose leader has proclaimed it his mission to 'spread democracy'. Is this, they ask, what democracy looks like?

Meanwhile, in Haiti

One of the places where Mr Bush is spreading democracy is Haiti, tied by history and culture to New Orleans in a way few other countries are. It is now tied by another bond: catastrophe following the decapitation of democracy.

As Jesse Jackson points out, the Republican administration of President Bush has neglected the cities because essentially, there are too many Democrat voters in them and not enough Republican. In Haiti the situation is somewhat different.

The head of state, the popularly elected president, was removed by the US Ambassador and a platoon of Marines, because, in the words of the American diplomat Luigi Einaudi, "the only thing wrong with Haiti is that it's run by Haitians".

The new Haitian regime run by American satraps, is busy trying to eliminate and terrorise the Haitian population to exterminate support for President Aristide.

Two weeks ago a crowd at a football match applauded when they saw members of the Haitian police entering the stadium. Since the match had been arranged by USAID as a peacekeeping, conciliatory gesture, the crowd thought that the cops were there to protect them.

No such luck. Gunfire broke out, and behind the police came machete-wielding masked men dealing death and dismemberment to random members of the stadium crowd.

It is still unclear how many people were butchered inside the stadium and outside as they ran for their lives. There is no body count coming from either the government, the Haitian police nor the supervising authority, the United Nations Mission - MINUSTAH.

In Haiti, as in New Orleans, chaos reigns. But, whereas in the New York Times and other the US media, pundits like Professor Krugman are calling for accountability for the disaster in New Orleans, no one is calling for accountability in Haiti.

Last year, because the legitimate government had been destroyed, more than 3,000 Haitians lost their lives to flooding from rain. The reason? The Bush-sponsored regime had chased into exile or murdered the community leaders whose duty it was to warn and prepare the people in the event of threatened disasters. They have not been replaced

The US weather service tells us by the way, that the 'bulk' of the current hurricane season is still ahead of us; that there are more hurricanes, more dangerous hurricanes, in the offing.

And, of course, the debate goes on. Is there such a thing as global warming? And doesn't global warming mean more hurricanes and more dangerous hurricanes?

For President Bush, the jury is still out. He sees no danger there. Meanwhile he will be visiting some of the hurricane stricken areas this weekend. He will not go to New Orleans.

That is too dangerous.

The Fear of Fear Itself

2005-08-28T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The prophet of the Christians, Jesus Christ, got it right: "Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."

When televangelist Pat Robertson a few days ago called for the murder of Venezuela's President Chavez there was a huge outburst of outrage, a kind of emotional fireworks display in response to the ever more predictable lunacies of the so-called Christian Right.

My father, who was a Baptist parson, would never, I think, have described Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the rest of the millionaire god-bothering sheep-stealers as Christians.

Those of us who do regard them as Christians forget that Falwell and Robertson, two days after September 11, 2001 said that the atrocity was God's punishment of the United States - probably deserved because of the anti-American activities of a variety of miscreants - gays, lesbians, advocates of civil liberties and other people bent on secularising America.

Jerry Falwell: "What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve."
Pat Robertson: "Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population."

And later in the programme:

Jerry Falwell: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"
Pat Robertson: "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government."

Both men more or less apologised in response to the public outrage provoked by their remarks, but their apologies seemed mere tactical withdrawals rather than sincere repentance for folly. And it took them a week to formulate their excuses.

Robertson's attempt to weasel his way out of the latest brouhaha is typical. As they said then, Robertson said last week: the remarks had been taken out of context; the press had misquoted. etc., etc.

The devil, and the evangelists, can cite scripture for their own purposes and Christians in America have justified all sorts of atrocities in the name of God since the time of the Conquistadors in Latin America and the North American Riders of the Purple Sage.

For nearly six centuries, Christians have regarded the world as a tabula rasa, awaiting the divine intervention of civilised men - a rifle in one hand and the Bible in the other.

One of President Bush's military advisers, one General Boykin, is celebrated for his assertion that in any struggle with the infidel, he, Boykin and fellow believers were bound to come out on top because "my God was bigger than his!"

Pat Robertson's adjuration to the CIA to blow away Hugo Chavez is exactly analogous to the contentions of Condoleezza Rice and her train bearers, Roger Noriega and Otto Reich, who believe that the Western hemisphere has been set aside by God for American jurisdiction and control and that anyone who disputes that thesis deserves to die.

Long ago, when Dr Rice was in infant school, the CIA launched the first of more than 200 attempts to murder Fidel Castro. Pat Robertson's grave sin is that he made it clear that nothing has changed since 1959.

TIME magazine, in its first cover story on Hugo Chavez did to Chavez what it did to O J Simpson 10 years ago: its artists made him several shades darker, emphasising their jaundiced view of his mixed ethnicity.

He was clearly illegitimate, a leftist with capital and the will to spend that capital on uplifting poor people in contrast to his predecessors who squandered Venezuela's oil wealth to create millionaires in Venezuela and the US.

While Castro created a revolution in one country, Chavez' control of oil makes him even more dangerous to US visions of Manifest Destiny.

That is why a few months ago, Dr Rice tried to strong-arm the Organisation of American States (OAS) into adopting a US resolution which would give legitimacy to forceful intervention by the OAS/US into the government of any country whose democracy was judged not up to scratch. They had already backed two failed attempts to overthrow him.

In Venezuela Chavez has repeatedly demonstrated that he is the overwhelming choice of his people but this means nothing to the US. Dr Rrice says he is a democratically elected dictator. It would be idle to point out that George Bush was not even elected the first time.

The intervention in Haiti was justified by the same kind of reasoning. An overwhelmingly popular and democratically elected leader was overthrown by the US marines because, like Oliver Twist, he asked for more for his starving people, exploited and brutalised by 200 years of foreign military and financial interventions.

The American challenge to a pluralistic world - to political diversity - is nowhere better demonstrated than in Iraq where "the necessity for regime change" was hypocritically converted into a crusade "against terror" with results that are becoming ever more apparent. Instead of being welcomed with flowers by an 'oppressed people', the US is fighting a war against an Iraqi resistance inspired by a nationalism which claims 8 thousand years of legitimacy.

The secular state of Iraq is in the process of being replaced by a government of Islamic fundamentalists which is unable to guarantee the safety of its citizens or the democratic rights of its women.

To the fundamentalists that is no big thing. Some of them say that women's rights are not essential to democracy; after all, women could not vote in the US for nearly two hundred years after the Declaration of Independence.

They don't say that blacks are disfranchised - to the political advantage of the religious fanatics - even now. It is, of course, anti-American to point out these things but not anti-American to steal elections in order to frustrate the will of the majority.

Religious fundamentalism in the US is not a purely Christian phenomenon. The Project for the New American Century, PNAC - the neo-conservative blueprint for world domination, was largely written by Jewish fundamentalists lovingly embraced by such as Robertson and Falwell who believe as Pat Robertson does, that: "Indeed, there will finally be such a fullness of Israel when their hardness and blindness to the gospel is overcome as to vastly enrich the whole world. For the almost unbelievable truth is that all Israel will be saved."

Elliott Abrams, a Jew and prominent neo-con and now a leading White House adviser has written: "Religion is now one of the organising principles behind American policy."

(Introduction to the book The Influence of Faith: Religious Groups and Foreign Policy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) Abrams is a former leader of the Iran-Contra conspiracy who escaped prison when he was pardoned by George Bush Sr.

The pragmatism of the Christian fundamentalists might be thought to contrast with the message oif the new Testament - "that ye love one another" only if one forgets that since the fundamentalists have created God in their own image, it is also possible to hold that "He that is not with me is against me" and justify hate and murder by further selective quotation to their own purpose.

The fundamentalists can find enemies and friends anywhere, as it suits them. The Spanish-American war was fought partly to Protestantise the evil Catholicism of the Spanish empire. The Palestinians - Philistines - have no place in Palestine because God gave the land to "His Chosen People". God is in his Heaven.

John Ashcroft, the former attorney general said it most succintly: "We are a nation called to defend freedom - a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God." The Washington Post, Feb. 20, 2002.

And presiding serenely above all of this is the president of the United States, George Bush, who has been recognised by the fundamentalists as their leader.

Shortly after his September 2001 faux pas, Pat Robertson resigned as leader of the Christian Coalition, a move greeted by Gary Bauer, one of the most toxic of the far-right spokesmen: "I think Robertson stepped down because the position has already been filled... [Bush] is that leader right now." The Washington Post, December 23, 2001

Bush sees "America's mission" as the spreading of freedom worldwide, whether the various subject peoples wish to be blessed with "American" ideas of freedom or not.

Faced with such certitude the pagans don't have a chance. And since the pagans mostly are poor, non-white and alien, they have been at the sharp end of capitalism for a very long time, a fact that seems to justiofy their remaining in their places - places appointed by the bigger God.

Mr Allan Greenspan, one of TIME's Committee to Save the World is reputed to sleep with a copy of Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged by his bedside, reading passages from it, as from a holy text, every morning. Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism teaches that selfishness is the supreme virtue.

The ideal Life is, literally, every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. This definition might almost be used to define globalised capitalism in which American multinationals mainly, are expected to have the right to determine the future of entire nations and civilisations, whose God is smaller than theirs.

As Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, and another member of the Committee to Save the World says: third world countries are vastly under-polluted and it would be cost-effective to export metropolitan toxic wastes to them because the lives of their citizens are so much less valuable than the lives of Americans.

The divine right to intervene militarily is tied to the divine rights to intervene politically and culturally. It is an offence against the sacred doctrine of free speech to try to prevent the dissemination of such evil works as 'Grand Theft Auto' - a series of video games in which the player can satisfy the most obscene fantasies of murder and bloody mayhem limited only by his own imagination.

These textbooks of wickedness are only now provoking any real controversy in their place of origin, the United States, not because of the barbaric violence but because of overtly sexual content. Murder is legitimate, love, or any simulacrum of it, is anti-Christian.

To make the slightest criticism of the US administration is to be 'anti American', outside the pale and subject to cataclysmic retribution. As Wayne Brown has related in his recent columns in this paper, rational criticism may be an excuse for informal torture.

To travel to the US is to lay oneself open to suspicion, misrepresentation and degrading treatment. Which is why I do not intend to ever darken their doors again.

I and many others feel threatened and not reassured by the policies of the United States.

People who never spoke to me 30 years ago because of my supposed ideological extremism, now walk up to me in supermarkets and on the street to commend me for my columns. And I thank all of those in the United States who have written to thank me for my writing.

I would ask them to be patient, however, as I am having serious computer problems and cannot reply as I would like.
In the meanwhile, consider the Jamaican aphorism: 'Time longer than rope'.

Bush, in Check

2005-08-21T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

In chess, the King is the most important piece but, at the same time, the weakest. All other pieces can move more than one square at a time; even the lowly pawns at their first move can move two squares. And even a pawn can place a King in Check.

The king is the centre of power and he must be protected at all cost. He cannot be captured, but if he is ever threatened with imminent capture - if he is in 'check' - his handler must either get him out immediately or be 'mated'. The game is over.

Watching the antics of Mr Bush's supporters over the past few days makes it plain that the president's handlers think he is in check, and, short of nuking Mrs Cindy Sheehan, they don't seem to have any good idea how to prevent checkmate and presidential meltdown.

This week, Cindy Sheehan went back to California to arrange care for her mother who has had a stroke. No one has blamed her mother's stroke on the Republicans, but it must have been difficult for any mother to endure the traducing and sliming of her daughter that Mrs Sheehan's mother has had to bear.

The basic Republican reflex under attack is the Hagfish defence - to generate so much slime that your opponent needs to spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and money to clean himself up. Cindy Sheehan, unlike Senator Kerry, Governor Dean and President Clinton has ignored the hagfish and avoided entangling herself in the slime.

Her critics accuse her of betraying America, dishonouring her son, dishonouring the soldiers in Iraq, everything except cannibalism but that, as in the case of Haiti's President Aristide, is no doubt on the cards.

Mrs Sheehan has stayed 'on message' as the Americans say. She long ago made up her mind about what she wanted and she has not shifted her vision.

She claims the right, as an American, to ask her President to explain to her why she should feel proud to have sacrificed her son to the war against the Iraqi people.

Why, she wants the President to explain, is dying in Iraq a 'noble cause' when neither ordinary Americans nor ordinary Iraqis are benefiting from the wholesale slaughter now in progress?

Why does it seem that the war is being fought to enrich people who can have no possible need for more wealth? Why is it noble to shed blood so that oil companies can make greater profits?

"I don't believe dying in a war of aggression on a country that's no threat to the United States of America is a noble cause."
In her quest, Mrs Sheehan is a surrogate for the journalistic profession of the United States, which overwhelmingly acted as Judas Goats leading Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein instigated the horrors of September 11, 2001, and conned and gulled them into believing the other nonsensical claims: that Iraq was armed to the teeth with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and just itching to let them loose on the United States and Israel.

Even now, there is afoot a public relations campaign to make a heroine and martyr out of one of the most dangerous propagandists for the war - a New York Times newsroom employee named Judith Miller.

Long after everyone else either knew or suspected that the authorised version of the casus belli was a gross fabrication fashioned to deceive, mislead and entrap millions of people into endorsing an unnecessary war, Judith Miller was pumping out stories about WMD, justifying the spilling of innocent blood and the degradation, starvation and torture, rape and murder of people who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The war converted large areas of the Middle East into hotbeds of terrorism, damaged and abrogated the civil rights of millions, particularly Iraqi women and has generally made the world a much less safe place than it was before the war began. Yet Mrs Miller goes to jail to still defend its authors.

For all this, the American press/media is largely to blame and head and shoulders among those miscreants is Judith Miller. She has gone to jail because she insists that she has a right to protect a 'confidential' informant whose malicious purpose was to discredit a loyal, truthful US citizen, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, by endangering the life and ending the career of his wife, an undercover CIA agent.

If that is heroism, give me treason any time.

Counterposed to this official martyr and heroine is the stubborn housewife from CowTown Vacaville, California whose husband is in the process of divorcing her because of all the attention she has brought to herself and her family.

In an ideal world of course, we would not need the Cindy Sheehans if the Judith Millers were doing their jobs. As a journalist, it is my duty and responsibility to protect the public interest and to defend it against all those who would subvert the public good for private aggrandisement of whatever description. One cannot be neutral; a journalist does not shed his responsibilities as a citizen when he walks through the newsroom door.

In my view, journalists are the immune system of the body politic - an analogy I have used so often that some people may be tired of hearing it. I make no apologies for repeating it, because it is true and because most of us who say we are journalists forget what we are supposed to be about.

It would be nice to be well off, to be able to take a holiday whenever one felt like it, to buy a new computer or a new car whenever one fancied.

But the real deal, the compact we have made with the public is that we are agents of the public, we are delegates of the people, exercising on their behalf, and only on their behalf, the rights, privileges and responsibilities that are supposedly represented by a free press.

We have no privilege to deceive the public. Our legislatures can pass any number of laws protecting journalists from the ravages of their ethics and their consciences, but however shielded we are, we ought to know where our duty lies and to be willing either to do it or to get out of the profession.

Some of us have become millionaires because of a mellifluous voice or a lucky break. After a while, the millionaires cease to be working journalists in any real sense of the word.

They become habitués of the corridors of power, too cosy with their more powerful subjects and further and further away from the people whose rights they are supposed to be defending. Their view of the public interest becomes intermeshed and confused with the views of their new class and of their employers and their interests.

Dan Rather, one of the few US 'anchors with real claim to being a real journalist, admitted to a British television audience that American journalists are hogtied by fear.

After September 11, 2001, he said, news on American television was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.

"It's that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions," Rather told his British audience in June 2002. "It's an obscene comparison," Rather said, "but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tyres around people's necks if they dissented.

"In some ways, the fear is that you will be necklaced here. You will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck." No US reporter who values his neck or career will "bore in on the tough questions".

Back in the USA, Rather came to heel; he told his TV audience: "George Bush is the President. He makes the decisions. He wants me to line up, just tell me where."

But not even that stopped them from necklacing Rather last year when he told a truth he could not prove, about the whereabouts of George Bush when that worthy was supposed to be doing his patriotic duty flying aeroplanes for the Texas National Guard. That soft option got him out of going to Vietnam, but it wasn't soft enough for him.

Meanwhile, while Rather was savaged for being inquisitive about George Bush, someone who actually served in combat and was wounded in Vietnam was being savaged apparently for not having the decency to die there rather than come back to haunt George Bush with a record of courage and service which Bush could not possibly match.

The US press was as usual even handed: it gave as much publicity to the lies about John Kerry as it gave to the 'lies' of Dan Rather. There are good lies and bad lies.

The quaintly named organisation - Accuracy in Media, AIM, is one of the senior hagfish of the US media scene. One of its more outstanding exploits was in December 2003 when it presented what it called "concrete proof" that Al Qaeda had worked with Saddam Hussein.

An AIM top honcho, Cliff Kincaid breathlessly reported that somebody called Con Coughlin had 'revealed the content of an Iraqi intelligence document showing that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorist hijackers, was trained in Baghdad just a few months before almost 3,000 people were murdered on American soil."

"While it is very explosive, this only adds to the evidence that has already been accumulated of how Saddam worked with al Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers . This is additional evidence of Saddam's crimes against humanity." So said Kincaid.

Many of us suspected then what we now know: the only legible documents discovered after the fall of Baghdad and the destruction of its administrative infrastructure were elaborate forgeries linking left wing types to all sorts of conspiracies, wickedness and cash.

George Galloway is just one victim of this professionally and governmentally organised fraud against public opinion. The media swallowed it totus porcus - whole hog. Dan Rather was attacked as a tool of Saddam for an interview he did in which Saddam spoke what we now know to be the truth.

So, don't ask what Cindy Sheehan is doing outside Mr Bush's ranch while he idles away the month of August, as he did just before September 11, 2001. What you need to ask is why the coterie of journalists enjoying Mr Bush's hospitality are not asking him the question Mrs Sheehan wants answered: what did you mean when you spoke of a 'noble cause'?

Some of us who opposed the war before it started carried placards saying, among other things: No Blood for Oil! Remember?

Cindy Sheehan, then as now, a loyal housewife and citizen, didn't carry any such placard. Then, she became a paradigm - a Gold Star mother.

Now, to some of those in high places, she is a pariah. Whatever she is, she has the president of the United States in check. Even pawns can put a king in check - and that, if you think about it, is what democracy, real democracy, is supposed to be about.

Putting People First

2005-08-14T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It took George Bush several years to achieve national recognition in the United States. A woman named Cindy Sheehan has attained worldwide recognition in one week by camping outside the gates of Mr Bush's 1,500 acre ranch in Texas.

Mrs Sheehan wants to talk to Mr Bush. Mr Bush does not want to talk to Mrs Sheehan. He says he has spoken to her before now.

Mrs Sheehan says that when she first spoke to Mr Bush, as a newly bereaved mother of a young US soldier freshly killed in Iraq there was no real communication between them.

Mrs Sheehan's ire is provoked by memories of her meeting with the president last June in company with several other families bereaved by the Iraq war. "He wouldn't look at the pictures of Casey. He didn't even know Casey's name. Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject."

According to her, Mr Bush behaved as if he were at a tea party. He was disrespectful to her she said, not bothering to find out who she was or what had happened to her son and he kept calling her 'mom'. Mr Bush is older than Mrs Sheehan.

Mrs Sheehan said she was so distraught at the time that she failed to ask the questions she now wants answered."I want him to honour my son by bringing the troops home immediately," Sheehan told reporters Saturday. "I don't want him to use my son's name or my name to justify any more killing."

Mrs Sheehan's son, Casey, was 24 years old when he was killed in Iraq, five days after arriving in that country.

The shock must have been extreme. Parents do not nurture their children to adulthood to see them sent out to be killed. On Thursday Mr Bush said he felt compassion for Mrs Sheehan as he took time out from his five week vacation to hold a press conference at his ranch.

But the president said he could not agree with Mrs Sheehan that American troops should be withdrawn from Iraq. That, he said, would send a "terrible message" to the insurgents.

Mrs Sheehan says she had always opposed the Iraq war in a vague way but her son's death crystallised her views; she now thinks he died in an immoral and unnecessary war, and no kind words from the president will change her view.

She wants President Bush to explain why it was necessary for him to send young americans to die in Iraq. Her anger was stoked by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and further fuelled by the Downing Street memorandum which made it plain that the facts were manipulated to justify the war.

"I want to ask the president, why did he kill my son?" Sheehan told reporters. "He said my son died in a noble cause, and I want to ask him what that noble cause is."

Last week Texas Rangers told Mrs Sheehan she would be arrested if she continued to camp out on the road to Mr Bush's ranch. She was given until Thursday to move.

She is still there, and says she won't move until she sees the president or he ends his vacation.

If this were a chess game, Mr Bush would be in Check.

The Invisible Poor

For much of the last several weeks the world's television screens have been populated by images of starving children, thin as sticks, many on the point of death.

The United Nations says that 32,000 children in Niger are in danger of dying from starvation and corollary ailments But strangely, the ruler of Niger, a former colonel named Mamadopu Tandja told correspondents last week that there was no famine in Niger.

It was all a conspiracy by journalists and NGOs like Oxfam who were promoting the idea of a famine in the hope of attracting more money.

Niger is an enormous country in the interior of West Africa, and includes some of the Sahara desert. As a child I remember looking at the map and wondering at the long, straight lines which defined colonial Africa.

It was only later that I realised that these countries were artificial constructs, designed by soldiers with protractors and set squares and admitting nothing of culture, language or any other civilised consideration.

Like most of post-colonial Africa the departure of the colonial power has meant that people coralled together by European power decided to establish their own identities as soon as they got the chance.

This brought wars and economic disruption, most of which was settled by the armies, the one functioning institution left behind by the colonisers.

Niger is a classic of the genre. It is a desperately poor country rich in natural resources. It boasts the largest uranium deposits in the world, but the wealth goes to a French company which mines the uranium, and to the dealers who buy uranium on the world market and sell it for about $20 a pound.

The uranium boom of the 1980s rapidly created a deep economic and social split within the country. A few rich, an elite, lived in the cities. The poor of various tribes, lived outside. In the population of about 13 million there are estimated to be 50,000 slaves - a legacy of the Atlantic slave trade.

And, of course, since the poor are outside the purview of the elite, they don't exist. Niger, unlike Haiti, is large enough that one can drive for days without seeing anyone, rich or poor. President Tandja told the BBC on Wednesday, "The people of Niger look well fed, as you can see." All the talk of mass starvation was just "foreign propaganda", deception by relief agencies to obtain increased funding. What problems there are, he says, "are not serious".

His critics insist that there is starvation. They insist that President Tandja himself is responsible for much of it. A severe drought and plagues of locusts devastated the country's farms. Tandja decided, as a faithful student of the World bank and the IMF, that if people wanted food or medicine they had to pay for it.

When people marched on the capital in July he refused to heed them saying it would be foolish to run down the government's reserves of food carefully built up for just such an emergency.

Meanwhile, Niger is waiting patiently for debt relief promised years ago by the World Bank and IMF in their Heavily Indebted Poor Country initiative and re-promised by the G8 in July. No doubt relief will arrive before the last peasant dies.

It is ironic, isn't it, that a country on which the West depends for its nuclear authority and a substantial portion of its electricity generation, is too poor to feed its own people?

That the country which provides the nuclear muscle for economic domination by the titans of the earth is existing literally, from hand to mouth? That Niger is the poorest country in the world?

The Reckoning

I am not surprised that those who defend Prime Minister Patterson's record seek to portray his critics as motivated by personal animus including racism. It doesn't surprise me because most of those defenders are members of the clique surrounding the prime minister, insulating him from any contact with the real world.

It was odd, though, when on the Breakfast Club on Friday I asked Mr Patterson's apologists to supply me with what they thought were Mr Patterson's signal achievements nobody could name one. The problem with PJ is simple.

He, like President Tandja and a host of others round the world, bought into the latest incarnation of the Trickle Down Theory. Instead of tackling human development he chose to build monstrous highways to get us more quickly from one urban traffic jam to another. He rescued the financial sector, lowered income tax, raised sales tax and borrowed money to pay the shortfall.

The result is that Jamaica is alone in the world in spending more on debt repayment than it spends on governing.

Our Millennium Project (MP) is the most expensive undertaking in our history - the Doomsday Highway. Norway - one of the world's richest countries - put its entire educational system free for all on the internet for its MP.

Instead of community development we spent millions on police cars, high powered weapons and bullet proof vests. Instead of spending money on education we spent it on rescuing rich investors from the consequences of their own folly and then marveled at the crime rate.

While Mr Patterson and Fidel Castro are probably the only world leaders still in office who signed the Treaty of Rio, Cuba is one of the most environmentally friendly countries in the world and Jamaica is one of the least.

The government flouts its own rules about public consultation and environmental impact assessments. Instead of building new schools, playing fields and swimming pools it first decided to give away part of our major Botanical Garden, and, thwarted in that piece of lunacy, handed over a precious biodiversity reserve, Long Mountain for a millionaire to make more millions.

And while neglecting public recreation and destroying the natural patrimony Mr Patterson's government latest bright idea is to steal public beaches to be handed over to private investors and to wall off the people from the sea.

A Man of Promise

2005-08-07T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Traditionally, the Jamaican Press has employed outsiders to do the heavy lifting. So I was not surprised that when the Gleaner at last decided on a critical examination of the Prime Minister's record it turned to an outsider, one Dr Penrole Brown, hitherto unknown.

The Prime Minister's consigliere, Senator Delano Franklyn has produced the ritual defence of the PM, one of the central points of which is this statement: "To be the longest continuous [sic] serving prime minister in a democratic country, where the people are free to elect or reject a political party every five years, is a phenomenal feat."

It would be a phenomenal feat if one does not remember the process. Five years ago, in an open letter to the PM calling for his retirement I wrote in this column:

"You have now been Prime Minister for about as long as anyone else in the history of Jamaica and you share with Michael Manley the distinction of having been re-elected in a contested election. Your majority has been massive.

You have had nothing to fear from your opponents, who, for the last six years, have been a thoroughly demoralised, disorganised rump of a once proud party. The odds are that you could continue being prime minister for as long as you wish, barring Acts of God and the Queen's enemies." (June 11,2000)

Long before Mr Patterson was re-elected in 1997, I was contending that Mr Seaga was the PM's secret weapon; as long as Seaga remained where he was, Mr Patterson would remain where he was.

Nobody believed me then

Senator Franklyn's defence seems to depend largely on what he calls Mr Patterson's government by consensus but which other, 'bad-minded' people like me might call misgovernment by committee.

If, as some say, a camel is a horse designed by a committee, it is notably more successful than anything produced by Mr Patterson's committees - if they ever produce anything. (Some young journalist should be assigned to discover just how many committees and task forces Mr Patterson has set up and the results.)

Franklyn excuses the PM for taking no action on education for 12 of his 13 years of stewardship. As Mr Patterson might say now that two of his 'committees' reports "have come to hand, they are under the most active consideration with a view to evaluating the options for possible expeditious implementation".

These reports are from the Task Force on Educational Reform appointed 18 months ago and the national four-month long 'island-wide consultations to develop, articulate and validate the National Shared Vision for Education in Jamaica'.

Coming more than a decade after Mr Patterson's inauguration, I suppose one could say that this demonstrates Mr Patterson's passionate dedication to intensive procrastination.

Values and Attitudes

In the meantime, one wonders what happened to the National Consultation on Values and Attitudes which petered out a decade ago for lack of interest and leadership?

Last month, the minister of foreign affairs tried to reassure Jamaica that the government had not sold the pass to the forces of GATS - the General Agreement on Trade in Services in which Jamaica imprudently, committed itself to globalising education despite the warnings of people like myself as long ago as 1998.

In a column entitled 'Global Reich', I warned that the Multilateral Agreement on Investment - the precursor of GATS - would have dire consequences for Jamaica.

"At the heart of MAI is the idea that in a truly free world, every millionaire should have the same rights as every other millionaire. Or, forgive me, every MacDonald's or Disney investing in say, Jamaica, should have the same rights as Tastee's or the local jerk pork counter. Any country so bold as to try give incentives to a local manufacturer of say, shoes, would be compelled, in the interest of fairness to give the same incentives to Shell or Esso if they decided to go into the shoe-manufacturing business."

Under the subhead - A world safe for Neanderthals - I declared that the new globalisation, typified by the MAI/GATS was "the twentieth century equivalent of the Conference of Berlin, which, just over a hundred years ago, carved up Africa into a dish fit for King Leopold of the Belgians and his fellow cannibals." - Global Reich April 12, 1998

So it has proved, and no amount of 'clarification' is going to get the Jamaican government or the Jamaican educational system out of this hole.

Our one possible consolation is that the University of the West Indies, not being an entirely Jamaican institution, may escape the consequences of Mr Patterson's malign neglect. UTECH, now run by the brother of the minister of finance, will not.

I find it really difficult to understand those who are only now discovering Mr Patterson's ineptitude. Talking about sugar and its apologists nearly 10 years ago I forecast what was going to happen when the bottom dropped out of the European Union bucket and added:

"Sugar is the charnel house of our history. Remaining in sugar is akin to finding peaceful uses for the gas ovens of Auschwitz." I condemned those who continued to plead for Jamaica to remain a sugar producer and to continue hewing wood and drawing water for the rich and idle of the world.

I contended that sugar is "an important part of the reason Jamaica is slipping back into the poverty of the colonial era.

"We have turned over to sugar without question, the land which it has always controlled, despite its criminal inefficiency, despite all the injury it has caused us, despite common sense. Somebody said that only lunatics continue to do things which they know don't work." - Avoidable Disasters Dec 29,1996

'The Duty of a Leader'

Another avoidable disaster is Haiti. In 1994, 11 years ago, I pleaded (in the Jamaica Herald) for Jamaica to offer some of our admittedly meagre resources to help Aristide rebuild Haiti's human infrastructure in agriculture particularly, and in creating a functioning civil service.

I thought we should make amends for our earlier sell-out of the Haitian cause, allowing what I then called 'American slave ships - floating barracoons' to be stationed in Kingston Harbour from which the US Coast Guard could sally forth to capture and 'process' Haitian refugees - including those who had already landed in Jamaica - and dispatch them back to their murderers, rapists and 'face-choppers' in Haiti.

Last year, Patterson did allow President Aristide some time in Jamaica after he was rescued from his illegal rendition to the Central African Republic after his kidnapping by the Americans and transportation across the Middle Passage with his family as "cargo".

But Patterson accommodated Aristide with bad grace and it is clear that he'd bought Colin Powell's argument that Aristide was wrong for Haiti and needed to be removed. In this he was joined by the equally politically backward and subservient governments of Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago, all of them forgetting that had it not been for Haiti, we might all be slaves still.

In his betrayal of Haiti, Patterson betrayed the example of Norman Manley and his own heritage and historical obligation. Nothing more damning can be said of him

How could a Jamaican prime minister fall for the arguments of such creatures as Roger Noriega and Otto Reich, the intellectual spawn of the infamous and admitted racist Jesse Helms?

How was it possible to betray Haiti not once, but twice? The Haitian cock will crow again, but hopefully, by then we will have a Jamaican leader able to blow the trumpet in response.

There is more, much more. Mr Patterson's environmental record is an unmitigated disaster: his misbegotten Operation Pride land giveaways; his refusal to obey the government's own rules on Environmental Impact Assessment; his government's beach-stealing programme; the monstrosities of the North Coast and Doomsday Highways, Portmore, Kingston Harbour; his foiled attempt to despoil Hope Gardens; and his successful depredations on Long Mountain are just the most obvious.

But why go on?

I will conclude with some lines from a column published on September 15, 1996, almost exactly nine years ago and especially appropriate now as the police are seeking to recruit high quality leadership from abroad.

At that time (1996), the police were resisting Col MacMillan's idea of a graduate entry programme: "That would provoke the police establishment which is quite content with its appalling lack of police competence and forensic expertise.

It is why most politicians, including Mr Knight, believe in giving the police more money, more cars and more firepower and in hanging more poor people."

In the same column, I concluded with words which I have no reason to regret and which are entirely appropriate today:
"The people of Jamaica find themselves at a dead end. There is no vision, no grand ideal behind which Jamaica can unite.

All sorts of sturdy beggars, "warners" and false prophets abound, precisely because there is no one who can, or will, speak on behalf of Jamaica.

"Worse, none of the [three] party leaders appears to want even to listen to the people, to understand their suffering and to voice it.

"Almost everybody in Jamaica is aware of what is wrong with this society. What nobody knows is who has the will to fix it. It certainly is not P J.

"As Norman Manley said: 'The duty of a leader is to lead'. - PJ Must Go!" September 15, 1996.

Murder at Stockwell

2005-07-31T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Nearly 50 years ago, in 1956, a British prime minister came to Jamaica to rest and recuperate after a very trying experience. Sir Anthony Eden, the debonair long-time understudy to Winston Churchill, had decided to undertake what must have seemed to him a Churchillian adventure: in concert with the French and the Israelis, he had invaded Egypt with the stated aim of recovering British property - the Suez Canal and, incidentally, to overthrow the Egyptian dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Nasser, Eden said, had his fingers clamped on Europe's jugular. Unfortunately for Eden the Americans refused to support him and forced the 'Allies' to withdraw. Eden, never a very robust man, suffered a nervous breakdown and came to Jamaica on his doctor's orders.

He stayed at a cottage on the north coast where he was guarded by Jamaican policemen and the British Secret Service. As an old soldier - who had won the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry - Eden always slept with a revolver in his bed.

The night after he got to Jamaica the Secret Service began an elaborate hoax. They reloaded his pistol with blank cartridges armed with bullets carved from soap. The reason: Eden had taken it into his head that the "fuzzy-wuzzies", as he called them, were after him, and almost every night he would awake, dash out into the garden and loose off a few shots to scare the rascals away. The neighbours were understanding.

When he went back to Britain it was to resign and hand over his office to Harold MacMillan, made of considerably sterner stuff. Mr Blair, Britain's current PM, is going on holiday soon, and while I don't think he is in the same case as Eden, I believe his doctors should advise him to take a rest. A really long holiday.

According to Mr Blair just a year ago, intervention in Iraq was necessary to prevent Islamist terrorists and the authoritarian Saddam regime armed with weapons of mass destruction from bringing down nuclear 'Armageddon' on all our heads.

Two Tuesdays ago, Mr Blair was asked at a press conference whether the British-backed and US-led invasion of Iraq had fueled terrorist attacks around the world and in London? Blair said "there is no excuse or justification" for the actions of the bombers.

"Whatever excuse or justification these people use, I do not believe we should give one inch to them, not in this country and the way we live our lives here, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in our support for two states, Israel and Palestine, not in our support for the alliances we choose, including with America.

Not one inch should we give to these people." He went even further - anyone who believes that Britain's role in Iraq has any connection to the London bombings is a "fellow traveller of terrorism".

To make such a connection was obscene, he said. Clearly he has forgotten what he himself said last year. The pollsters have news for Mr Blair. According to a Daily Mirror/GMTV poll, fully 85 per cent of Mr Blair's constituents are "fellow travellers of terrorism" because they believe that Blair's decision to join the US-led war in Iraq was one of the causes of the London terror bombings

As Andrew Murray said in Wednesday's Guardian, "Tony Blair appears to be on the brink of a Brechtian moment, in which he will need to dissolve the people who have lost his confidence and elect another."

The problem for Blair is that most of us knew, well before it happened, that the invasion could not be justified on any grounds other than as support for George Bush in his grudge fight on behalf of his father and other oil-men against Saddam Hussein.

Hans Blix, former head of the UN inspection team in Iraq, was scathing in his comments about Bush and Blair. The unemotional and very correct Scandinavian diplomat was unequivocal. He told BBC Television last year: "The intention was to dramatise it [the intelligence] just as the vendors of some merchandise are trying to exaggerate the importance of what they have. From politicians, our leaders in the Western world, I think we expect more than that, a bit more sincerity." "Honesty", I believe, was the word Blix was looking for.

Mr Blair's recent vaporings about a "terrorist ideology" apparently "deeply rooted in Islam" has caused the resurgence - with a vengeance - of predictable animus against Muslims and darker skinned people. One in five British Muslims reports harassment of varying degrees within the last three weeks.

They, and other darker skinned people are even more discomfited (and discomforted) by the statement by Blair's namesake, Ian Blair, head of the London Metropolitan police, who has said that the shoot-to-kill policy will remain in place even after the murder of the Brazilian electrician at Stockwell.

Under the law, the police are permitted to use deadly force in defence of life, their own or others' and they must use no more force than is required. Anything else is murder.

So, I was not the only person horrified to watch on the BBC as a very rational Briton described the last moments of Jean Charles de Menezes. He said de Menezes fell into the train under the weight of four or five policemen, and then, when he was immobilised, incapable of action, obviously terrified, in the hands and at the mercy of the police, a left-handed policeman fired his Glock pistol five or six times into the boy's head.

It has transpired that many things the police said then were untrue: de Menezes was not connected to the bombing conspiracy, he was not clad in a bulky coat which could have concealed weapons.

But he had been followed for nearly two miles by several of more than 200 policemen on duty in the immediate area, and he had been followed on foot, on a bus, on foot again and into the underground station before somebody decided that he needed to die.

He was shot eight times, seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. It was the concatenation of institutionalised racism and Mr Blair's institutional hysteria.

I mourn de Menezes, not only because he could have been my son or your brother, but because his death was so totally unnecessary and cruel.

The Brazilians mourn him and the British government paid for his body to be returned to his birthplace in Brazil and are expecting to pay even more for damages for his unlawful killing.

But there is more to mourn: Paul Myers, a reporter for the Guardian, a British-born man of Jamaican parentage, writes eloquently of the new and additional threats to people who wear the uniform of underprivilege.

In a piece entitled 'Black men can't run', Myers writes: "De Menezes acted suspiciously by running" is one line that's wheeled out to abrogate responsibility for a catastrophe. But if you're in an ethnic minority the errors seem to hit you thick and fast throughout your life. It really doesn't take that much for a police officer to be 'suspicious'.

"Like countless other law-abiding black men in the capital, I've been stopped, questioned and searched by police professing to be doing their utmost to protect the community. When I owned a Golf convertible I'd be tailed or pulled over for driving what they suspected to be a stolen car."

Reg Phillips, who some said was my double, was deputy high commissioner for Jamaica in London during the sixties. He was pulled over several times while driving his own car by police who could not believe that someone like him had the right to be driving the car he owned. In the US these days, black people have a word for it - DWB, they call it - Driving While Black.

More than a hundred years ago, W.E.B. du Bois predicted "the problem of the 20th Century will be the problem of the Colour Line". He could have no idea that his prediction would be valid for another century.

Third World Error

The Brazilians, as may be expected, are traumatised by the murder in London of one of their own. According to the Associated Press, President Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva's representative at the funeral, Human Rights Secretary Mario Mamede, told Agencia Estado news: "We cannot tolerate the violation of human rights in the name of combating terrorism."

On Wednesday, President Lula called de Menezes' family in Gonzaga to express his condolences. "The police committed a gross, stupid, third world error," says Maria do Socorro Alves, a cousin of the dead man.

And another relative of de Menezes said it was strange that while in Brazil de Menezes was regarded as white, in Britain he was Black. The colour line in Brazil is as convoluted as it is in North America or Britain.

In a country with a majority black population, most people consider themselves white - part of the vicious legacy of slavery and racism. The situation is similar to Haiti, where an elite boasting a spectrum of skin tones considers itself different from, and superior to, those 'officially black' who make up more than 90 per cent of the population.

So it is perhaps understandable that while Brazil's President Ignácio Lula da Silva can send his foreign minister to question the British foreign secretary over the death one young Brazilian electrician, a Brazilian general in Haiti can lead Brazilian and other troops in the UN "peacekeeping mission" in support of the elite power structure and of the assassins and rapists now ruling Haiti in their name.

The Brazilian human rights secretary can piously intone that "We cannot tolerate the violation of human rights in the name of combating terrorism", but this same minister cannot find the time to give audience to emissaries from Brazilian trade unions and from others who want to discuss with the Brazilian government its complicity in the continuing slaughter of innocent Haitians in the name of combating terrorism on behalf of the Haitian elite, the Americans, the Canadians and the French.

Meanwhile, the clichés and platitudes ooze like toothpaste from a poisoned tube: "We are desperately sorry," says Mr Blair of the death of de Menezes, but he won't allow his soldiers to conduct a body count of the Iraqis they kill.

And of course, to make these points is to incite the fuzzy-wuzzies, to make the natives restless, to be a fellow traveller of terrorism. Except that we are not alone.

All those millions who marched to denounce the war, all those bloggers, journalists and newspaper editors and ordinary people of all races, religions, ages and colours who lent their voices to the protests all over the world against injustice are still here and quite obviously, are still not convinced by Bush, Blair and Co.
It seems there may still be hope for humanity.

'Extremism in Defence of Freedom'

2005-07-24T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Some of my Jamaican readers want to know why I have recently written so much about events outside of Jamaica instead of paying more attention to what's happening here. The reason is quite simple: the developments I write about are having or will soon have momentous effects inside Jamaica, and we need to be prepared for that.

Shortly after 9/11, I wrote a column titled "Bin Laden's Bees" in which I forecast how I thought al Qaeda terrorism would develop. In that column I compared Al Qaeda to a colony of bees. If the Queen is killed the worker bees simply transfer a few of the late Queen's most recent eggs to Queen cells, where, instead of developing into worker bees, they develop into queens. The first emerging new queen - or the most vigorous - then kills the remaining queens manqué and the hive goes on.

A forensic officer examines a car near to where a suspected terrorist bomb exploded on a bus in Woburn Place and Tavistock Square in London 07 July 2005. Explosions ripped through three underground trains and a bus in London, killing at least 56 people and injuring more than 700 in a wave of 'terrorist attacks' a day after the capital won its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games and as G8 leaders met in Scotland. (Photo: AP)

In the same way, I said, Al Qaeda could not be defeated by killing Bin Laden. Terrorism would continue as long as there was enough fuel for its anger. It was my thesis that terrorists are driven not so much by ideology as by a sense of grievance, a perception of hopelessness and helplessness in the face of injustice.

So, I am perhaps one of the few who has not been surprised that two Jamaicans are among the Al Qaeda terrorists. One, Richard Reid, tried to blow up himself and a planeload of people shortly after 9/11. The other, Germaine Lindsay, was among the assassins of 7/7 in London.

Last week the British Home secretary, Charles Clarke, announced that Britain was establishing a global list of extremists who would face automatic vetting before being allowed into Britain. Clarke said the database would list "unacceptable behaviour" such as radical preaching, websites and writing articles intended to foment terrorism.

Presence on the list means that people would face exclusion from the UK. Mr Clarke also said he planned a new offence of "indirect incitement to terrorism", to add to the current offence of direct incitement. The new offence "targets those who, while not directly inciting, glorify and condone terrorist acts knowing full well that the effect on their listeners will be to encourage them to turn to terrorism".

This would seem to be a recipe to exclude from Britain anyone the government considered to be opposed to its policies.
If Clare Short, a former member of Mr Blair's Cabinet, were a foreigner, she would no doubt be excluded by Mr Clarke's list.

Last week she said: "Some of the voices that have been coming from the government that talk as though this is all evil, and that everything we do is fine, when in fact we are implicated in the slaughter of large numbers of civilians in Iraq and supporting a Middle East policy that for the Palestinians creates this sense of double standards - that feeds anger."

Mr Clarke's list would also probably include me, since I believe that the British and American policies on terrorism are not only wrong, but totally foolish, hypocritical and unrealistic. In Mr Clarke's view, that probably amounts to condonation of terrorism.

While Mr Clarke's list would probably catch Ms Short and me, it would certainly not have caught any of the 9/11 bombers nor any of those whose bombs spread carnage and terror in London two weeks ago. Indeed, Mr Clarke told the House of Commons that the four London bombers were "cleanskins" - with no convictions or known terrorist involvement.

As I pointed out shortly after 9/11, those terrorists were apparently clean, decent, upstanding young men, some with young families, who had never been in any kind of trouble. They were all or mostly all, middle class types - bourgeois - if you like, whose very conventionality or ordinariness was what allowed them to bypass US airline security with such ease.

In a speech to a Labour Party conference on Saturday, July 16, Prime Minister Blair said "What we are confronting here is an evil ideology. It is not a clash of civilisations. All civilised people, Muslim or other, feel revulsion at it. But it is a global struggle and it is a battle of ideas, hearts and minds, both within Islam and outside it.

"The extremist propaganda is cleverly aimed at their target audience. It plays on our tolerance and good nature; it exploits the tendency to guilt of the developed world; as if it is our behaviour that should change; that if we only tried to work out and act on their grievances, we could lift this evil; that if we changed our behaviour, they would change theirs. This is a misunderstanding of a catastrophic order.

"Their cause is not founded on an injustice. It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such it can't be moderated. It can't be remedied. It has to be stood up to. And, of course, they will use any issue that is a matter of dissent within our democracy. But we should lay bare the almost-devilish logic behind such manipulation.

"If it is the plight of the Palestinians that drives them, why, every time it looks as if Israel and Palestine are making progress, does the same ideology perpetrate an outrage that turns hope back into despair?"

Mr Blair conflates the doctrines of Al Qaeda with the beliefs of those who may or may not be acting on its behalf. For this he was rebuked by John McDonnell, chairman of the 500-strong Labour Representation Committee, at which Mr Blair spoke. McDonnell said "Please do not try to tell us that the war in Iraq played no part.

This assertion is simply intellectually unsustainable. Now is the time to prevent further violence by renouncing violent solutions ourselves. "For as long as Britain remains in occupation of Iraq, the terrorist recruiters will have the argument they seek to attract more susceptible young recruits to bomb teams. Britain must withdraw now."

The problem is much more complicated than Blair appears to imagine. It seems to me likely that the terrorist cause depends not so much on Al Qaeda as on the perception of injustice on which Al Qaeda feeds.

Like bees, potential assassins do not have to be told how to think. And what is even more terrifying is the paradox that it is from among the most westernised young men that terrorism will draw its recruits. Muslim youth in madrassahs in Pakistan may be imbued with the most insensate hatred of western civilisation, but they are unlikely to be able to do much about it.

The people who are really dangerous are the young, idealistic men who live in societies which preach human rights, justice and civilisation while practicing racism, injustice and contempt for the rights of the powerless.

Tony Blair asks: "If it is the plight of the Palestinians that drives them, why, every time it looks as if Israel and Palestine are making progress, does the same ideology perpetrate an outrage that turns hope back into despair?"

The answer is simple. The world has watched Israel's total defiance of UN resolutions for 60 years. And while Israel was supposedly negotiating in good faith with the Palestinians last week it was also announcing plans to build a wall across Jerusalem.

As the Independent reported on July 12: "Israel's decision to press ahead with a barrier that will separate 55,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem from the rest of the city has provoked a storm of criticism, prompting the Palestinian prime minister to state that the fence will make "a farce" of Ariel Sharon's peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.

Prime Minister Ahmad Qureia said the move was "theft in broad daylight" of land Palestinians hope will form part of their future capital."

The European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, arriving for the talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, said: "We think that Israel has the right to defend itself, but we think the fence which will stand outside the territory of Israel is not legally proper and it creates also humanitarian problems." In situations like these, the hypocrisy is blatant, the injustice patent. No one needs Al Qaeda to point that out.

American Justice in Haiti

In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the most important man is the American ambassador, Mr Thomas Foley. It was he, accompanied by a detachment of US Marines, who arrived before dawn in February last year, to 'assist' the lawfully elected President of the country to leave. The president called it a kidnapping, and it is hard to see how else it could be described.

Now, Mr Foley has done a good deed. He has apparently arranged that the Catholic priest, Fr Gerard Jean Juste, will not be summarily executed by the assassins who now rule Haiti. Fr Jean Juste went to Haiti on a visit last week and was arrested and beaten up by goons working for the government.

Fr Jean Juste has been living in Miami since his release from prison in October last year. He went back to Haiti to visit his flock after the UN mission - MINUSTAH - attacked and slaughtered an uncounted number of poor slum dwellers two weeks ago.

He was then arrested, charged with something that happened in Haiti while he was in Miami, released, then beaten up when he attended a funeral, re-arrested and thrown into prison, this time, allegedly, for the murder of the journalist whose funeral he was attending.

Also arrested was his friend, Professor Bill Quigley, an American professor of law. Action by Haitian activists in the United States has apparently gained the priest some security in his prison cell, but no one, except Ambassador Foley, can say whether he lives or dies within the next few days.

Extremism in Defence of Freedom

Forty years ago I wrote an editorial in Public Opinion, (of which I was then Editor) titled "Lyndon Goldwater." In the 1964 presidential election, Lyndon Johnson had just wiped Senator Barry Goldwater off the political map, ridiculing his statement that "Extremism in defence of Freedom is no vice". And then, as soon as he had been safely inaugurated, Johnson decided to bomb Vietnam, just what Goldwater had argued for.

Anyone for tennis?

Terror and Justice

2005-07-17T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Many people believe that writing a column is duck soup. You just think of something that intrigues, concerns or provokes you in some way, sit down and blast off. It isn't that simple; and it can be a horribly frustrating job.

For instance, I had this week intended to review a new book by the Caribbean scholar Clinton Hutton, entitled The Cosmological roots of Haitian freedom: the logic and historical significance of the Haitian revolution.

Dr Hutton's book is no less than a bold and, in my opinion, entirely successful guerrilla attack on the premises of modern historiography, an overwhelmingly racist enterprise whose major purpose has been to relegate Africa and all its children to an enclosure of historical curiosae, a kind of intellectual zoo.

Hutton quotes Toussaint's reply to Napoleon Bonaparte, who had attempted to impose conditions on Haiti's sense of self, after the Haitians had already thrown out one Napoleonic army and were on the point of defeating a second.

"It is not a circumstantial liberty conceded to us that we wish, but the unequivocal adoption of the principle that no man, whether he be born red, black or white, can become the property of his fellowmen."

As Hutton says: "Toussaint's incisive reply to Bonaparte must be counted philosophically and politically as one of the most radical, most important epistemological and ontological statements on justice in human intercourse, not only of the modern age, but of any age.

Soon the revolution would combine abolition with self-determination, thereby transforming it from an anti-slavery revolution to a national liberation/anticolonial revolution: the first such revolution in the modern world."

The Haitians spoke of and demanded the recognition of universal human rights, and insisted that civilisation demanded justice for all, no matter the colour of the skin or any other characteristic. It is a principle not recognised by the world until 1948 after the second war to entrench freedom in the world.

Hutton points out that while there has never been mainstream recognition of these key tenets of political philosophy as Haitian cum universal, they have, however, been colonised by, and/or subsumed in the western philosophical tradition, reinforcing the epistemology of silence on the one hand, and perpetuating the myth of the West as the cognitive basis for defining, knowing and certifying things on the other hand.

Hutton argues persuasively that the voodoo religion - misinterpreted, libeled and denigrated by western scholars - was the magma in which was syncretised the whole "thinking and knowing of the enslaved, the cosmological bases and context of the meanings they created, inherited, recreated, adopted, adapted, weaved and quilted to explain the nature of their being, their existential reality, their hopes and aspirations, and to guide their action to mediate, manipulate, neutralise and overcome the encumbrances imposed on their lives" by the European 'soul-thieves'.

Hutton concludes by noting that the Haitian elites, in the process of their own identity construction, were purposeful agents in the "silencing and marginalisation of the centrality of Africa and the African Diaspora in the making of the Haitian revolution" so that "the retracing of Haitian freedom, identity and certitude to French knowing and being became a modus operandi of elite agency in the social, political, cultural and economic development of Haiti".

The Haitian elite are once again riding high, backed by the United States, France, Canada and the United Nations itself in what must surely be the greatest betrayal of human rights in history. Last week, Mr Jack Straw apologised to the Bosnian Muslims for the neglect which caused the deaths of 3,000 in Srebenicza.

The forces of evil have already killed more than that in Haiti. And last week the United Nations troops in Haiti, under the command of a Brazilian general, massacred uncounted numbers of Haitians in a successful attempt to assassinate the leader of the poor people of the Cite Soleil, a slum as big as Kingston, and the natural product of American and French interference and exploitation of Haiti over two centuries.

American spokesmen are still as vulgar and stupid as William Jennings Bryan, American secretary of state who, in 1915, was dumbstruck at the idea of 'Niggers speaking French!' Mr Bush must be scandalised.

Bryan's modern day equivalent, Luigi Einaudi, the (American) assistant secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), retired two weeks ago, to the hypocritical encomiums of such as the black Caribbean's spokesperson for the occasion, a lady named Mrs Sonia Johnny, from St Lucia. She said Einaudi was a "facilitator in the ongoing quest for consensus".

She, poor soul, was probably not aware of Mr Einaudi's real claim to fame, his statement in Haiti, a year ago, that the only thing wrong with Haiti was that it was being run by Haitians. And the OAS and UN speak of the inalienable right to self-determination.

But these days, vulgar racist ignoramuses like Einaudi are thick on the ground. It must have something to do with global warming which allows lower forms of life to flourish.

Belgian Roulette

The Belgian Government has thrown a spanner in the works of the debt forgiveness charade which the G8 so proudly hailed two weeks ago as a new dawn for Africa.

The Belgians, ever mindful of the civilised niceties, think that forgiving Third World debt will set a bad example and encourage 'moral hazard'.

As far as they are concerned, Third World debt resulted from spending sprees embarked upon by the feckless borrowers of the Third World, and not, as some of us see it, the inevitable consequence of the starvation wages we got from producing ever more at ever cheaper rates to satisfy the inexhaustible hunger of the First World for our diamonds, uranium, bananas, sugar and aluminium.

We are irresponsible children, in need of moral guidance. Oh! for a King Leopold to set the world to rights!

Or, perhaps, a Bernie Ebbers, sentenced to 25 years imprisonment last week for defrauding his shareholders of $75 billion, a tad more than the West is offering in debt forgiveness and aid to the entire developing world, beset by AIDS, global warming and, of course, hurricanes.

In search of an honest statesman

Real sportsmen are rare - as the West indies Cricket Board continues to prove. Real sportsmen do, however, exist. One of them is a golfer called David Toms, who on Thursday disqualified himself from the British Open because he had signed an incorrect score card.

No one but Toms saw when he hit a moving ball, an infraction of the rules which should have cost him two penalty strokes. He could easily have got away with it. His conscience wouldn't let him.

Conscience is not a quality on display in the more important chancelleries of the world. The British prime minister, in his first statement after the London bombings, declared that it was the work of Muslim extremists.

No one had yet discovered the identity of the bombers. And Mr Blair kept repeating his slogan while, at the same time, promising his Muslim audience and everybody else that he did not wish to divide the society, he didn't want to stir up hatred.
It seems clear to me that if he was so sure that the assassins were

Muslim extremists before anyone had told him so, there could only be one reason - a bad conscience. Why should they be Muslim extremists?

Because, it would seem, Mr Blair recognises that Muslims have very real reasons to be angry with Britain. Palestine may be one reason; Iraq may be another; Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo represent collateral damage, like Falluja.

The newspaper of the Jamaican diocese of the Anglican (Episcopalian) Church recently quoted something I wrote nine years ago. "We have sat silently by for years, watching judges and policemen trample on the human rights of poor people.

We have endured without protest the worst tyrannies of incompetent public and private bureaucracies as they brutalised our children.prisoners in jails, helpers, common-law wives, workers and consumers. .

We can no longer avoid a confrontation with the truth. If we, as a community do not rearrange our society to suit all of us, some of us will rearrange it to suit themselves, and it will not matter then who is of good or bad reputation."

I was talking about Jamaica, but I was also talking about the world. With all the uproar about the bombings, few people have noticed that Israel has quietly built an illegal wall across Jerusalem, separating some Palestinians from their own front yards.

As I and many others remarked immediately after 9/11, terrorism cannot be defeated by war. There is no central government of terrorism.

Terrorism is born in the hearts of those who have no other way to protest the injustices done to them, to express their hopelessness and their sense of futility.

In his novel, "The Leopard", my late friend and mentor, Vic Reid, used a ghastly metaphor to express the feeling of the hunted Kikuyu warrior in the Mau Mau struggle. To kill his enemy, the warrior thought, was to "make him beautiful".

It is a horrific image, but I believe it probably expresses the mindset of those who have been so long oppressed and brutalised that the road to darkness and death seems like the only route to the promised land.

Do people like Tony Blair ever try to imagine what goes on in the minds of those he describes as motivated by evil?

Terror and Civilisation

2005-07-10T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

My first horror-struck reaction was to grab the phone. Were any of my children on the trains or on that bus? Two of my three children live in England, and although they do not live in London, it was entirely possible that they might have been there on some kind of business.

I phoned and discovered that they were safe. I was lucky. There are thousands of people who are not so lucky: those who died, those who lost daughters, sons, husbands wives and other loved ones, those who were maimed, their grieving friends, and people everywhere who know that we are cannon fodder in the world war now in progress.

Mr Blair made it explicit. He was shocked, disappointed that the terrorists had not taken note of his and Mr Bush's grand intentions to alleviate poverty in Africa and hopefully, to make some palliative statement about global warming. For him it was clear: the barbarians against the civilised world. I couldn't believe my ears.

I grieve, because, as John Donne said 500 years ago, any man's death diminishes me. I am a part of the human race and any damage, any loss anywhere, disfigures me, reduces my humanity, my variousness.

Global warming was here last week in the shape of Hurricane Dennis. It will be visiting us again and again in the shape of more frequent, more destructive hurricanes.

Hurricanes used to be acts of God. Now they are, to a measurable extent, acts of man. Melting glaciers, icecaps, melting continents, sea level rise, hotter seas and more violent and unpredictable weather are the products of global warming, warming caused by the greed, selfishness and waste of a minority of human beings.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow your children and grandchildren will pay for it.

When Mr Bush repeated the riff about civilisation, I thought about the strange coincidences in this life: about the fact that September 11 represents not one but two horrific anniversaries - one in New York, another, 30 years before in Chile. While that thought was making its way through my head, it was announced that 37 people had been killed in London by the agents of barbarism.

The figure 37 was immediately transposed in my head into 73, the number of innocents blown out of the Caribbean sky 29 years ago because they happened to have been passengers in a Cuban aeroplane.

As in London, the selection was random: men, women and children, Christians and non-Christians.
And I wondered, would Messrs Bush and Blair now be able to pay proper attention to their latest charity agenda? What panacea would they be able to offer to Africa after their concentration had been so brutally distracted?

In the Guardian a few days ago, John Vidal gave a learned disquisition on the 'kleptocracy' which had impoverished Africa. He was in the noble tradition of Englishmen since Sir Francis Drake, who have found viable excuses for the enslavement of Africans.

In the old days, wicked Africans offered their kin for sale, and the poor, Christian English, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch had no option but to buy them to prevent them becoming 'bush-meat'. In the process somebody, no doubt the Africans themselves, destroyed countless nations, civilisations and cultures and even a university or two.

And Columbus, Pizarro and their brethren were clearly on a civilising mission when they destroyed the Aztec, Maya and Inca civilisations in the cause of returning South American gold to its rightful European owners.

And when American geographers discovered in Mexico, 10-ton monolithic sculptures of African heads, they were in no doubt that these heads could not have been carved by people who had invented a calendar more accurate than any available in the "West" for another 2,000 years.

So that I want to know, for instance, why it is not reckoned as a crime the fact that the United Nations, under the influence of the United States, Britain and France, should have presided over the starvation deaths of a million Iraqis, half of them children, during a 13-year 'Sanctions regime"? Or why nobody knows how many Iraqis or Palestinians have been killed in the War Against Terror?

Mr Blair and Mr Bush in their civilising mission in Africa were given a fine launching pad by the combined forces of pop music and public relations in the Live 8 concerts. The cannon fodder of the north coming to the aid of the cannon fodder of the south.

Now, the Lords of the Earth would step in and show that they meant business. Africa would get some money, far less than it needed, far less than has been extorted from its people, far less than it repays in usurious loans. But Africa would get money, would get AID to fight AIDS and Malaria; get AID if they behaved themselves, if they pledged to become civilised adults.

The First Globalisation

The history of the Congo is the most explicit demonstration of African haplessness and irremediable wickedness.
Five hundred years ago, Affonso Mani-Kongo (King of the Kongo) had, in tribute to his Christian proselytisation, changed his name from Nzinga Mbemba. It did him no good.

In the year 1526 AD, the Mani-Kongo wrote King John of Portugal as one Christian monarch to another. He complained that his Kingdom was being corrupted by the agents of King John, who had abused the trading concessions given to them, corrupting his subjects and buying their loyalty.

Worse, wrote the Mani-Kongo, "the merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the lands and some of noblemen and vassals and our relatives, because the thieves and men of bad conscience grab them. and get them to be sold; and so great is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and you, Highness, should not agree with this nor accept it as in your service".

King John turned a deaf ear to Affonso. The Portuguese tried to assassinate him, deposed him and took over his kingdom and began the mass export of slaves to the New World.

The Portuguese never fulfilled their promises of foreign aid and technical assistance - never supplied the artisans and teachers they had promised Affonso as their part of the bargain which allowed them to trade in his Kingdom. Later the Portuguese killed another Mani-Kongo, Antonio I, and his kingdom broke up into a number of small states, parts of what are present day Angola and the Congo.

The extinction of civilisations on both sides of the Atlantic provided the capital on which capitalism itself and the European Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries were erected.

Over the years, various European traders penetrated the Congo in search of gold and slaves, but the vast area once ruled by the Mani-Kongo was under the jurisdiction of no one power.

So enter King Leopold of the Belgians, just over a century ago. He asked for and was awarded the Congo by the British, Americans, French and Germans at the Berlin Conference of 1886.

According to King Leopold, his International Association of the Congo was a sort of "Society of the Red Cross .formed with the noble aim of rendering lasting and disinterested service to the cause of progress" as he wrote in an article published by the Times of London.

The noble cause was so effective that, according to demographers, it reduced the population of the Congo by 10 million between 1880 and 1920. Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, said the Congo lost one-half of its population in those 40 years.

The Belgian Government, in response to worldwide disgust at the excesses of Leopold, took over the management of the Congo and ruled it so well that Antwerp became the centre of the world's trade in diamonds, and Belgium, bereft of natural resources, became a respectable European power.

In the 40 years between 1920 and 1960, the population of the Congo grew by about three million; In the 33 years after Independence, it more than tripled.

The Congo had been civilised: In a country one-third the size of the United States, the Belgians left behind five Congolese doctors. When the Congolese decided they had had enough of the Belgians, in 1960, the Belgians, terrified, ran away, leaving behind chaos and confusion. The United States stepped in behind the skirts of the United Nations.

The US National Security Council decided that the answer to the democratic turmoil was to cut off the head of the agitation. The NSC ordered the death of Patrice Lumumba. Their stooge, Joseph Mobutu, carried out the assassination on the instructions of Frank Carlucci, first secretary of the US Embassy, later a patron of Colin Powell.

Mobutu was always the Americans' darling. As Newsweek said in 1997: "It was mainly the United States, France and Belgium that put Mobutu in power and helped to keep him there as a bulwark against cold war rivals.

He was a 'useful tyrant' and as the West protected him. it tolerated his corruption and autocracy. Mobutu earned his keep. In his last great service to Washington, he allowed his territory to be used for the CIA's paramilitary operations in support of anti-Marxist rebel Jonas Savimbi in Angola."

President Reagan often welcomed Savimbi to the White House, praising him as a "voice of good sense and good will". Savimbi led a 40-year war against his own people, and in the process left most of the country dangerously littered with land mines, which are still killing innocent people.

It is obviously a myth that an African king ruled not only the Congo and Angola five centuries ago. And, when the British finally conquered Nigeria just over 100 years ago, it is a myth that they found functioning systems of government. Obviously, the Kings and Chiefs they found were incompetent poseurs, incapable of ruling anything and, probably, figments of their own perfervid imaginations.

The French made the point forcefully when they abandoned ship in Guinea in 1958. They took every filing cabinet, every telephone and every desk from every government office. Guinea did not deserve a government.

So when Messrs Bush and Blair announce this weekend their assistance for Africa, we of the dark corners of the world, we lesser breeds without the law, should be properly grateful.

And it is, of course, no use contending - as some of us are wont to do - that it was in Haiti, 200 years ago, that the world first experienced the concept of universal human rights. Like the Olmec/Aztec/Mayan calendar, that too is a myth - which we will discuss next week.

Inside Their Heads

2005-07-03T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

About three weeks ago, there were news stories to the effect that one in four Americans was afflicted by mental illness and that fully a quarter of those were so seriously affected that their illnesses disrupted their ability to live normal lives.

These stories were based on the first results of a worldwide study carried out by a team led by the Harvard professor of mental health, Ronald Kessler.

Kessler says that the United States leads the world in mental ill-health: "We lead the world in a lot of good things, but we're also leaders in this one particular domain where we'd rather not be."

The survey did not include some of the most serious mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism, so that the actual results understate the degree to which Americans suffer from mental health problems.

About one in two Americans will develop a mental disorder at some time in their lives, the survey of nearly 10,000 US adults found. Younger sufferers tended to be overlooked, even though mental illness is typically a disease of youth. "Half of those who will ever be diagnosed with mental illness show signs of the disorder by age 14, and three-quarters by age 24."

"Mental disorders are really the most important chronic conditions of youth in America," said Professor Kessler, "Sadly ... these early onset disorders very seldom come to the attention of the treatment system unless they're very severe."

Less than half of those in need of treatment ever get help. Those typically get treatment after a decade or more of trying to cope on their own - during which time they are likely to have developed additional problems. About a third of those affected relied on non-professional assistance.

Part of the problem is the stigma of mental illness, the lack of medical insurance and the fact that most people ignore the early warning signs of mental disability.

I must confess that as I read the report I could not help wondering whether much of the bizarre behaviour of US troops abroad may not be due to mental illness.

Right after the Americans entered Baghdad, I remember reading a New York Times story by Dexter Filkins quoting a young American soldier who told him that he had shot a young woman because she happened to be standing in the wrong place.

Barbarous assaults on civilians, the shooting up of cars loaded with children and similar actions begin to be explicable if one understands that much of the US army consists of frightened young men who joined the army to get a job or an education, not to go abroad to kill people.

Their training, particularly in the Marines, conditions them to believe that every civilian is a terrorist determined to kill. If they are suffering from antecedent states of pathological anxiety and depression, their behaviour becomes easier to understand, if not to forgive.

It also helps to explain why the Army finds it so easy to make scapegoats out of such as Lyndie England and the other poor, underprivileged young people involved in the tortures at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. They are like Henry II's knights, needing the merest hint to go off and commit mayhem. And their superiors, knowing this, are generous with their hints.

Remember the American general who explained why the first detainees were transported to Guantanamo, manacled, shackled to the floor of the plane, blindfolded and gagged? They were the sort of folks "who will chew through the hydraulic lines of an aircraft. These are the Hannibal Lecters of south-west Asia".

If you identify the enemy in this way, as insensate robots, human piranhas with no appetite except for blood and death, it isn't too hard to imagine how impressionable young recruits with no great hold on reality will interpret their mandate. It's simply "Nightmare on Elm Street" made flesh.

And they will have heard and observed how casually their elders and betters dismissed the black holes and the massacres of Kunduz and Mazar al-Sharif. Falluja then becomes not a city of people to be pacified, but a nest of vipers to be exterminated and obliterated.

So, when a group of American soldiers - military police - were told in a training drill at Guantanamo Bay that a man in a yellow jump suit was a recalcitrant prisoner, they beat him to a pulp.

Sergeant Sean Baker, a military policeman, said that as he was being choked and beaten he screamed a code word, "RED!!!" and shouted: "I'm a US soldier! I'm a US soldier!"

But the beating continued until his jumpsuit was yanked down during the struggle, revealing his military uniform. Baker is suing the Department of Defence for $15 million for multiple injuries, including a fractured skull and a traumatic brain injury.

Baker's lawsuit charges: "Armed with the highly inflammatory, false, incendiary and misleading information that had been loaded into their psyches by their platoon leader, these perceptions and fears ... became their operative reality, and they acted upon these fears, all to the detriment of Sean Baker."

It can hardly have surprised thinking Americans when it was revealed two weeks ago just how unpopular they are around the world. In Canada and Britain, a majority - sadly diminished since 2002, but still a majority - have favourable opinions of the US.

In most of the rest of the world, most people do not have a good opinion of the US. Outside of the United States itself, only India and Indonesia believe that the foreign policy of the US considers anything but its own interests.

Strange Fruit

In the sixties, that fabled time so many aeons ago, Black Power, Vietnam and Flower Power coexisted in the hearts and minds of the so-called Baby Boomers and lots of other people around the world.

I was in London, where being tear-gassed or baton-charged and arrested were par for the course when you were defending human rights, assailing L B J for the Vietnam war and making love, not war.

One of our anthems then was a song by folk singer Tom Paxton entitled Goodman and Schwerner and Chaney, part of the true parable of three young men, a Jew, a Gentile and a Black, three of the idealistic youth who invaded the southern states of the US trying to get black people registered to vote, trying to tear down the walls of American Apartheid.

Two weeks ago, 40 years almost to the day after the three young men were murdered and buried under 15 feet of farmyard soil, the man who planned their killings was finally sentenced to pay for his crime. But Edgar Ray

Killen, a classic know-nothing fundamentalist part-time preacher was not the real author of the killings. He was simply the excrescential expression of an American sub-culture which then was respectable and is once again becoming fashionable.

American fascism has never been far below the surface of American life, and before it came to be called fascism it was part of the slave-owning plantation ethos which depended upon parasitising other kinds of people and other nations for its opulent existence.

It was only three years ago that one of its main ideologists, Jesse Helms, withdrew his objection to the provision by the United States of foreign aid to fight HIV/AIDS abroad, which is killing millions of people, mostly Black, around the world.

But he maintained his opposition to federal spending on HIV-AIDS inside the US, maintaining that AIDS would disappear if only people would give up their homosexual 'lifestyles'.

Helms was no doubt aware that AIDS was extremely efficient at killing Blacks and that the pandemic is spreading fastest among women.

Two weeks ago, there was an important development of interest in the area of HIV/AIDS. It did not appear to concern HIV/AIDS at all, but it did. This development was the licencing by the Food and Drug Administration of a drug to treat a particular ethnic group, African Americans with certain kinds of heart disease.

Scientists cannot explain why one drug should be so much more effective in people of one ethnic background than in others. But there was a clue in 2003 when a vaccine designed to immunise against HIV/AIDS turned out to be several times more effective among Blacks than among any other ethnic group.

Reporting the story two years ago, the New York Times headline was "Large Trial Finds AIDS Vaccine Fails to Stop Infection" - which was why most people missed it. The lead paragraph read: "The first AIDS vaccine ever to be tested in a large number of people has failed, overall, to protect them from infection with the virus that causes the disease, the company that makes it, VaxGen, said today."

The real news was in the second paragraph: "The vaccine did, however, seem to significantly lower the infection rate among African-Americans and other non-Hispanic minorities participating in the trial, the company said."

But after the headline and the first paragraph, who would have read further? Researchers called the finding totally unexpected and said they were at a loss to explain why there would be ethnic differences in response to the vaccine. One would have expected that the scientists would immediately have tried more ambitious testing among Blacks, who are the most at risk of AIDS.

Poverty and prison records tend to be among the major risk factors for HIV/AIDS in the US, and Blacks are overwhelmingly poor and form a disproportionate component of the prison population. Perhaps the vaccine could be tested in prisons?

But no. The scientists have gone back to study the 'problem'. Dr Anthony Fauci, the famous director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the trial statistics seemed impressive, but scientists would need to determine whether the protective benefits were due to a statistical fluke or some unexplained biological or behavioural factor.

Meanwhile, according to UNAIDS, in 2002 only 30,000 people out of almost 30 million living with HIV/Aids in sub-Saharan Africa were being given the drugs that in the West keep infected men and women alive, well and working for years. In Botswana, 40 per cent of the population is sero-positive and every second pregnant woman is infected.

Meanwhile, it should please cat fanciers everywhere to know that a working vaccine against FIV - feline immunodeficiency virus - has been developed and was licenced for veterinary use three years ago.

The FIV virus is similar to the HIV virus and has similar effects on infected cats.

I kid you not.

Toward an African Renaissance

2005-06-12T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

I have been invited to take part in a conference, mainly of scholars, to attempt to formulate a world view for Africa and the African Diaspora. The conference, being held in Tshwane, the city formerly known as Pretoria, is a project of the Centre for African Renaissance Studies at the University of South Africa.

To take part in this assemblage, for this purpose at this time is, for me, a transcendent honour. Four decades ago, as editor of Public Opinion I published Nelson Mandela's speech in his own defence to a charge of treason against Apartheid. I published it then in a forlorn hope that one day, some day, Mandela would be freed from prison and that one day, some day, the people of South Africa would regain their freedom and their dignity.

For a long time that did not seem remotely possible. I remember interviewing James Callaghan, then deputy to Britain's premier Harold Wilson, at the 1975 Commonwealth Heads of Government conference. Callaghan was positively rude when I asked him why Britain did not abrogate its Simonstown agreement with South Africa. Britain, I said, was aiding and abetting a crime against humanity.

Ten years later, President Reagan was still welcoming Jonas Savimbi of Angola to the White House and the Congress of the United States was refusing to join in sanctions against South Africa. The enemies of the regime were, according to American leaders, terrorists. Less than 10 years after that, Mandela was free and shortly thereafter the South African people recovered their human rights and their country.

Norman Manley did not live to see that day, but he was one of the first allies of Mandela, Luthuli and company when in 1958 he banned trade with South Africa. The British, then colonial landlords of this place, told Manley he could not do that. To which Manley's answer was the equivalent of the one-fingered salute.

So, now, the times have changed and people like me can freely enter South Africa and salute its liberty.

Many of us believe that African slaves were drawn only from West Africa. In fact, the slave trade was a war against all of Africa, and people were sucked into this voracious maelstrom of the Middle Passage from all over Africa. A few years ago, an English DNA researcher discovered that one of his secretaries, a Jamaican woman from St Elizabeth, owed her mitochrondial DNA to the Kikuyu at the other side of the continent.

Slavery was not simply a crime against Africa and Africans, it was the first crime against humanity. It devastated civilisations in Africa and in the 'New world', looted the history and the wealth of hundreds of nations, depraved and dehumanised people and left as its legacy the lasting libel that black people are unable to run their own affairs.

The now rampant neo-fascist apologists for so-called neo-liberalism are in direct line of moral descent from those who petitioned Pope Nicholas V in 1454 to sanction the slave trade between Portugal and Africa. Then, in 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued this bull: granting to Spain the same privileges his predecessor had to Portugal.

In the words of the Pope, Spain now received "full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities and other properties, and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery".

In the generations following, learned discourses defended the system of slavery, particularly of blacks, because according to these early capitalists, blacks were not quite human and required leadership and instruction. Real humanity was the property of the Portuguese, the Spanish and later the English who the Iberians then considered pretty barbaric, if not actually barbarians.

Our slavery started with Columbus, who had been a slave trader in Africa and who wrote in his journal about the peaceful 'Indians' he had found in the Bahamas. According to him: "They are fit to be ordered about and made to work, to sow and everything else that may be needed. Nothing was lacking but to know the language and to give them orders."

In 1839, 300 years after Pope Nicholas, Pope Gregory XVI declared: "with profound sorrow - there were to be found. among the faithful men who, shamefully blinded by the desire of sordid gain, in lonely and distant countries, did not hesitate to reduce to slavery Indians, negroes and other wretched peoples, or else, by instituting or developing the trade in those who had been made slaves by others, to favour their unworthy practice."

The American fixation on the inferiority of blacks had its justification in greed - the desire for super profits from the plantations of cotton and rice and later sugar. The titration of humanity continued into the American Revolution, which after grave deliberation, decided that blacks were three-fifths human, or just 10 per cent away from apes.

But while the Americans were calculating how many capitalists could dance on the head of a peon, the slaves of Saint Domingue, the world's richest colony, rose up, abolished slavery and chased the slavemasters away.

Unfortunately for them, they did not chase all of the slavemasters away, and out of the spawn of those arose in Haiti a small group of rich, light-skinned people - the elites, whose interests have fitted perfectly into the interests of the racists in the United States.

Between them, last year, on the second centenary of the abolition of Slavery and the Independence of Haiti, those interests engineered the re-enslavement of Haiti, kidnapping and expelling the president and installing in his place a gang of murderous thugs, killers, rapists and con-men.

An American named Luigi Einaudi, deputy secretary-general of the OAS was pleased to declare a short time before that usurpation of democracy, that the only thing wrong with Haiti was that it was being run by Haitians.

It was the first time in nearly 100 years that this was the case, the Americans having occupied Haiti for 15 years to 1934, and leaving behind them puppets whose corruption and wickedness flowered into the Duvalier dictatorship of father and son. This arrangement suited the Americans quite well until the Haitians rose up and threw out 'Baby Doc' Duvalier in pursuit of freedom.

The Haitians did not get much of a chance to enjoy that freedom. The leader of their struggle, a priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was elected president only to be overthrown before halfway through his term.

He was restored with American troops, not before a black American leader had energised President Clinton by beginning a fast unto death. Randall Robinson, who undertook that fast, is one of the participants in the Tshwane conference. I look forward to meeting him.

Robinson is an American hero, driven from his native land by its hypocrisy, hysteria and greed combined with a dispassionate inhumanity. His book published earlier this year by Penguin is titled Quitting America. It is much more than about quitting America. It is also an elegiac appeal for us to recognise our common humanity and our duty to our brothers.

In America this week, the Senate, after 30 years of appeals by Afro-American interests, will formally apologise for taking so long to pass a law against lynching. That same Senate, after two years of bullying by the president and his claque, approved the elevation of Mrs Janice Rogers Brown, a judge of California's Supreme Court to the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D C.

Mrs Brown is black and, in my view, typical of those who, like the African slave catchers in Africa, colluded with oppressors against their own real community interest in the hope that by feeding their friends to the crocodiles they will not be eaten.

"If we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression."

She seems blissfully unaware that she is in fact describing her own Government, led by people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush, who have demonstrated no commitment to human rights and freedom but have instituted the rule of an oligarchy, by the oligarchy, for the oligarchy. How would Mrs Brown deal, one wonders, with someone described by the Bush Administration as that legal fiction an 'unlawful combatant'?

Mrs Brown is against such things as affirmative action, but she is for recognising commercial enterprises' right to free speech, as if they were human. "In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery," she has warned.

In her speeches she has argued that society and the courts have turned away from the founders' emphasis on personal responsibility toward a culture of government regulation and dependency that threatens fundamental freedoms.

They are also turning away from the definition of blacks as part human, but that does not apparently concern Mrs Brown. In the gated democracy of which she is now a gatekeeper, it would be interesting to hear her views on what her own prospects would now be as a sharecropper's daughter without the protection of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action.

This would be especially poignant in the new world created by the neo-liberal counter-revolution. In this world, the rights of workers and the poor are being taken away, they are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer and even less accountable.

According to the New York Times' interpretation of the latest American income statistics, after the Bush tax cuts, the only taxpayers whose tax liabilities declined were those in the top 0.1 per cent, that is, one-thousandth of the taxpaying cohort. According to the New York Times: "The average income for the top 0.1 per cent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two-and-a-half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast.

The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 per cent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 per cent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 per cent fell.

The Times analysis points to an increasing tendency for the state to operate quite specifically on behalf of the rich and to pauperise the poor. This is precisely the effect that globalisation is having on the rest of the world.

In Africa, that means that hundreds of children die every day from starvation or gastroenteritis because their governments cannot afford to train or pay doctors or to provide clean drinking water.

Yet Africa, according to the World Bank's 2003 Global Development Finance report, is the land of opportunity, offering "the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world".

One question I intend to pose is why Africans should not share in their own wealth and why the shares should be decided by people in boardrooms in New York, London and Zurich?

The Naked and the Un-Dead

2005-06-05T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Havana, Cuba. Friday: For anyone who might feel queasy at killing a cockroach, the words and the images are more than disturbing: they begin to remodel one's view of 'human nature' itself.

Even though we know, in Jamaica, that people kill other people at the rate of two dozen a week, nothing can prepare us for the sight and sound of Orlando Bosch - a Cuban-born professional murderer, attempting to justify his part in killing a planeload of innocents off the coast of Barbados 30 years ago.

To Bosch they all deserved to die. The members of a Korean trade mission were, to him, evil allies of Fidel Castro; the teenaged Cuban fencing team was fair game because they were 'niggers' - teenagers who had won every fencing medal at the Pan American Games and were taking the medals home to present to Castro because "he had been so good to them".

The Guyanese students on their way to medical school in Cuba deserved to die because "Bishop (sic) was then president of Guyana" and so on.

It was worse to hear the stories of the survivors of the United States' four decades war against Cuba. Mothers awoke to the sound of gunfire to find their children's shredded bodies beside them, the young girl who had dreamt of growing up to wear high heels awoke to find her feet amputated by a 50 calibre machine gun bullet; the survivor of the sabotage of the ammunition ship La Coubre in Havana harbour - when hundreds died - awoke to find himself covered by human body parts.

And what could prepare you for the story of Hebe de Bonafini who has spent almost every day for the last 26 years with other mothers in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, calling for justice for their children, tortured, murdered and 'disappeared'.

Bosch (left) and Posada Carriles. planned and executed the bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane on October 6, 1976

Bonafini lost one son to the murderers of the state, then another, then her house was burnt down; one of her compatriots disappeared, then another; Susanna, Estela and Mariposa, because they insisted on going to the Plaza de Mayo to demand justice.

And then she met the plausible young lieutenant who came ostensibly to give comfort but who was in reality a spy and a murderer himself. The mothers were terrified. Somehow they found the courage to continue. They read American-produced manuals of torture approved by the US State Department and the CIA.

One manual even instructed torturers in the kidnapping of children to terrorise the population. Pregnant women were murdered; babies and children of murdered mothers taken from them and given to their torturers and high officials of state, to be reared as anti-communist activists.

And the mothers read the manuals and learned in excruciating detail of the obscene horrors their children had been made to suffer, all in the name of anti-Communism and "Operation Condor".

"Operation Condor" was the name of a US-sponsored programme of terrorist murder, torture and 'disappearance' intended to cleanse Latin America of socialists and communists and revolutionaries and whoever got in the way of their crusade.

Operation Condor murdered Orlando Letelier, President Allende's foreign minister, seeking justice in Washington for his murdered leader. Condor murdered Ronnie Moffitt, Letelier's American secretary, blown up in the same fireball Condor made of Letelier's car. Condor killed Chilean generals Orlando Leighton in Rome and Carlos Prats in Argentina, because they were known to be loyal to the oaths they had sworn to protect Chile.

More than 3,000 friends of Cuba are in Havana, hearing evidence, giving testimony, intended to pressure the US to do the decent thing - to surrender Luis Posada Carriles to a properly constituted Venezuelan court to answer charges that he engineered the mass murder of 73 people in a Cubana Airlines plane off the coast of Barbados on October 6, 1976.

The Government and people of Cuba insist that they do not want revenge, only justice. They take President Bush seriously when he says that if you are not against terrorism, then you are a terrorist, or that he who shelters a terrorist is a terrorist himself.

Last week, the Cubans exposed a whole panorama of terrorism. As they pointed out, they have been terrorised for 46 years, ever since Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Juan Almeida led the 26th of July movement in its three-year-long guerrilla war against the bloody tyranny of Fulgencio Batista.

Batista's henchmen presented to Haydee Santamaria, on a plate, the eyes of her murdered brother Abel. Today, nearly half-a-century later, the Cuban people are facing the same enemies, using the same methods to frighten them out of their freedom and rob them of their dignity.

In 1960, I was arrested in Havana's Parque Central. I was taking pictures of the young children of Juventud Rebelde (a sort of junior cadet corps) marching in the Parque Central.

A week or so earlier, Life magazine had published a spread on the same troop of Juventud Rebelde, drilling in the same park. The pictures had been taken by a Black American photographer. I was released to great jubilation when the police discovered that I was a British subject: "Ingles! Ingles!" they shouted when I found a UN temporary Press pass from the year before.

I had gone to Cuba at my own expense to find out about this Cuban revolution which was creating so many waves in North America. Everybody I knew was against my trip. Wills Isaacs, then minister of trade and industry, offered me a year on an Israeli kibbutz if I would give up my 'dangerous' plan.

In Cuba I found teenagers teaching their elders to read, I found the army leading construction brigades hand assembling prefabricated concrete houses to replace the 'bohios' (thatched huts) in Pinar del Rio. I saw and heard Fidel and Che at a million-strong meeting in the Plaza de la Revolucion and interviewed Carlos Rafael Rodriquez. I learned about the Agrarian reform.

I met former prostitutes who rejoiced in the fact that Fidel had freed them from bondage, teachers who had previously 'rented' their jobs from soldiers, milicianos and milicianas intent on creating a new Cuba. Right in front of the National Capitol was a huge sign advertising Coca Cola. Inside, the Capitol had been transformed into the Ministry for the Recovery of Stolen National Property.

The workers were militant. At Cuba's biggest daily newspaper, Diario de La Marina, the workers insisted on inserting 'coletillas' - brief disclaimers attached to anti-Castro propaganda reports. The management resisted; the Government intervened, the paper was taken over. Freedom of the Press, the Americans said, was dead in Cuba.

The night I arrived in Cuba, bandits sped down the Prado spraying machine gunfire indiscriminately. About that time, signs produced by the US Embassy began appearing on the houses of those more loyal to the US than to their own country: "This building is under the protection of the United States of America."

Like magic, new signs sprouted the next day: "This house is under the protection of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba."

"We are no Communist, we are Humanist," the people told me then. Policemen could not be seen in bars. Pregnant women were told to go see their doctors every six weeks. Most Cuban doctors had deserted to the US. The Government began a crash programme to train doctors.

Nowadays, every city block has its own doctor, its own clinic. Thousands of Cuban doctors and nurses and teachers work in countries all over the developing world and Cuban biotechnology is among the world's best.

The Cubans estimate that the United States campaigns, not including the embargo, have cost them more than 3,000 lives and $65 billion. The embargo has cost them another $79 billion. Despite this punishment, the Cubans' education and health services are among the best in the world, and rates of crime and HIV/AIDS are practically undetectable.

The odds of getting mugged in Cuba are probably about the same as in Greenland. In all the words spoken at this conference, as harrowing and gut-wrenching as they have been, the most potent have been those of the president of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon.

Alarcon, in his speech, quoted only official documents of the United States provided under the Freedom of Information Act.
These documents contain explosive information about the role of the US in terrorism in Latin America.

One wonders what the US Press, in its magisterial freedom, will make of them. Among other things the documents witness:

Luis Posada Carriles for most of the last half century has been a CIA asset, trained, supported and protected by the CIA;
Orlando Bosch was involved in the assassination of Orlando Letelier; that he had boasted to that effect at a fund-raising dinner in Caracas and that those present drank a toast to the murder of Letelier;
the US Government knew, three months before the event, that Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles were planning to blow up a Cuban plane in the air;
Bosch and Posada, with Lugo and Hernandez, planned and executed the bombing and reported back to the US to that effect;
Bosch and Posada (then head of DISIP - the Venezuelan Secret Service) had plans to leave Venezuela after the bombing and that Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser to President Ford, was aware of the facts and that the CIA was attempting to get him out;
the United States intervened to get official Salvadoran identity papers for Posada Carriles who then became national security adviser to the Salvadorean Government;
in 1992, Posada Carriles spent six-and-a-half hours in the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras;
A bomb exploded at la Guardia Airport in New York - the most atrocious attack until then, in the USA. The perpetrator was Orlando Otero Hernandez, eventually identified as the culprit while he was in Chile with Bosch as the guest of Pinochet. He got eight years in prison for the atrocity.

Then there is the case of the Miami Five, Cubans sentenced in Miami to long jail terms for "espionage", although the evidence presented made it clear that they were not spying against the US but gathering information against terrorists.

They infiltrated the Cuban Mafia in Miami and learned of plots to blow up aircraft. Their information was sent by Cuba to the proper authorities in the USA as required under the Montreal Convention. Instead of arresting the plotters, the US arrested the informants and sentenced them to long terms in jail, at huge distances from their families and under conditions which amount to torture.

While the Miami police were busy rounding up the Cubans and framing them for espionage, several gentlemen from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere were undergoing flight training at airfields nearby, for a mission that would shake the world.

They Cry 'Respect' - AGAIN!

2005-05-29T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

"The grave's a fine and private place, but none I think, do there embrace" - or traffic drugs, for that matter. Fundamentalists obviously believe something different. A 26 year-old Australian woman, Chavelle Corby, was on Friday sentenced to 20 years in prison for smuggling 10 pounds of ganja into Bali, Indonesia.

Indonesia, like many other countries in Southeast Asia, is very hard on drug traffickers. It doesn't matter that Miss Corby (who had no previous trouble with the law) contended that the drugs found in her bag must have been put there by baggage handlers in Australia.

Most Australians believe her. The Indonesian court said she had presented no evidence to back her contention, a position rather like the US position that Iraq had presented no evidence that it had no WMDs.

Anyway, whether Miss Corby is guilty or not is beside the point. She has been found guilty and sentenced. There are some in Indonesia who think that 20 years in prison is not enough.

Anak Agung Semara Adhyana, who heads the Bali chapter of Indonesia's Anti-Narcotics Movement, said his organisation would prefer that offenders be sentenced to life [imprisonment] or put to death by firing squad. "We still call for life imprisonment or death," he said. "We think a lesson should be learned."

I thought that if dead men can tell no tales, neither could they learn. Perhaps there are ganja fields in hell and Miss Corby needs to be convinced that in the afterlife, she must keep her nose clean.

Capital punishment doesn't punish the dead, only the living. And since (as the United States has been proving with DNA evidence) guilty verdicts are often mistaken or corrupted, it is clear that many innocent people have been executed "In Error' - as the euphemists say.

The fundamentalists do not really care. Anyone executed must be guilty of some capital crime, even if not the one they have been sentenced for. God does not make mistakes.

Which is an odd position, since if God is correctly quoted as saying "Vengeance is mine" - why should he need any help ? If God is omnipotent, why does he need hangmen?

Why are we so thirsty for blood and revenge? The desire for retribution is perfectly logical in the sense that the criminal should pay for his crime. He should not get a free pass.

But how do we assess the value of one life compared to another? As I argued when the Israelis executed Adolph Eichman four decades ago, it was ridiculous to think that killing Eichman could possibly be reparation for his part in the killing of six million Jews and assorted blacks, Gypsies, homosexuals and other 'untermenschen'.

It is not simply ridiculous as a matter of scale, it is ridiculous if one believes that every person is unique and has a unique contribution to make to the world. Mr Azan's offer to become Jamaica's next hangman cannot possibly contribute to any meaningful appreciation of his relative's life, but rather demeans it.

To join the ranks of the killers is as much a defeat as is the United States' descent into torture to 'fight terrorism'. Or to have to decide between 'good' terrorists like Posada Carriles and 'bad' terrorists like Osama bin Laden, between bad murderers and good hangmen.

No man is an island, John Donne said. Every man's death diminishes me and all of us. The police and others demand at emotional gunpoint, that all the knee-jerk bleeding-heart-liberals should issue press releases when a policeman dies, just as we condemn the killing of innocent people by policemen.

No one rejoices when anyone dies, and when a policeman dies, his death diminishes all of us. We cannot take sides against anything but wickedness.

When the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica decided last week to shut down their businesses in protest against crime, it seemed to me an empty gesture. We are all sad and we all grieve at the senseless killings. But making political statements won't stop the gunmen.

We cannot eradicate crime by killing criminals. We need to prevent people becoming criminals and we need to catch and imprison those whom we can't stop in any other way.

Those who call for death sentences to be carried out in Jamaica would seem to be unaware of many facts that make their arguments less than convincing.

First, the idea of State revenge and retribution is the most potent argument for murder. If the State can kill, why then, so can I! If the State can kill in error, why then, so can I! If the police can catch only about one in three of all criminals, it means that a life of crime has a 66 per cent chance of success - better odds than opening a small business.

If we caught and tried all murderers in Jamaica, we would, at any given time, have between 20 and 30 murder trials in progress during any one week.

Clearly, this is not the case, so it seems that if we are to talk about crime reduction, we must first deal with the first principle: the greatest deterrent to wrongdoing is the probability that the wrongdoer will be caught, exposed and punished. If you don't catch me, how can you prove that crime does not pay?

We obviously have to begin to rethink our positions. First of all, let us forget about task forces and special anti-crime squads. We have more than enough information about the factors promoting delinquent behaviour. We don't need any more.

We even have the World Bank being able to predict with a high degree of accuracy, what Jamaica's murder rate will be, given certain economic data.

We know that the State is unable to deal with the economic causes of crime. Any self-respecting State, 30 years ago, could implement programmes to produce work, increase employment, rebuild communities, collect the garbage and ensure that there were beat duty policemen.

The Jamaican State has many of the same problems as those others who followed our lead in accepting the ukases of the unholy trinity - the IMF, the World Bank and USAID. Conditionality was used to give us an excuse to relax and enjoy the apparently inevitable rape.

As the OECD advised us, leaders could claim 'tied hands' in order to ignore democratic pressure. We cut off our limbs like Calcutta beggars, to induce sympathy in our benefactors. The more helpless we were, the more help we would get.

Privatisation, liberalisation and devaluation have not produced the promised fulfilment. Instead, by levelling the income tax, by taking the poor, by shutting down government enterprises or selling them, by turning skilled men and women into sidewalk peddlers, we find ourselves in a hand-to-mouth existence where, if we want to construct a social safety net, we have to borrow the money from the World Bank to be repaid by our grandchildren.

This means that in the 'ghetto' the garbage goes uncollected, the fire brigade has no trucks, water is scarce and/or unsafe, gastroenteritis, malnutrition, stunting, overcrowding, incest and HIV/AIDS are rife, gunmen provide community protection and the community goes to hell in the basket we have been given to carry water.

Ten years ago, some of us pleaded with our rulers just to read the report They Cry Respect, product of a university intervention. This short report examines several communities of poor people of different ideologies and voting preferences.

All were of the same general opinion: most people wanted peace, safety and community development, all of which were impossible because the State had abandoned them. One of the many reports on crime and violence was in fact edited by the present Minister of National Security when he was a socialist and a lecturer at the university.

The problems are well known, the prescriptions are clear and the benefits of intelligent and humane action have been spelled out, not least in World Bank publications on crime and violence in Jamaica and the effect of economic conditions on youth behaviour.

So, why don't we do what we know to be right?

Why is a private sector, which is financing criminality through extortion, not willing to look at itself and its part in the problem? Why is the Government unable or unwilling to pay the teachers as much money and respect as they do the police?

The only rational answer must be that the present situation, by and large, suits them. If it didn't, we would very soon hear about it. When I hosted the radio talk-show Disclosure on Wednesday, several of my interlocutors told me that what we need to do is simple. They believed that the State must better reflect the community which it is supposed to represent.

This meant going out to promote the healthy environments which are the essential background for peaceful development. We need clean streets, safe streets, streets without criminals, garbage and child-traps.

We need training programmes for the young men and we need more schools so that they can get better basic and advanced education and training. We need apprenticeship programmes and, above all, we need to give the people back their self-respect.

If the private sector is to have any serious claim to be the engine of growth, it needs to understand that social growth and development must complement economic development in order to enable economic development.

As President Aristide once said, if all we have is a dung heap and we want to create Paradise, then we must start with the dung heap.

Our Lives in Their Hands

2005-05-23T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Field Marshal von Rumsfeld is correct. The Iraq Torture Scandal is going to get worse, much worse before it blows over. Before that happens, however, the scandal will have presented to the people of the United States a unique opportunity for decision: whether to follow the Bush Administration's precipitous descent into a degenerate corporate statism and ultimately, dictatorship, or to seize control of the ideals and instruments bequeathed them by their founding fathers two centuries ago, to re-invent a functioning democracy.

Franklin Roosevelt, and most of the liberal democrats who have led the United States at one level or another, believed that the US "constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form" as he said in his first inaugural speech in January 1933.

Most American leaders - presidents and others and particularly the members of the Supreme Court - did not, until recently, regard the US Constitution as inherently vulnerable to subversion. Of whatever party, all felt constrained by an idea of 'America' which was inherently well-meaning and dedicated to the greater good of the people as a whole.

Roosevelt put it this way in his inaugural speech:

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realise as we have never realised before, our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good.

Who Benefits?

The Bush counter-revolution, on the other hand, makes no bones about its dedication to the larger good of the rich and powerful. At this very moment it is engaged in an ideological struggle within its own ranks in the Senate, to entrench new benefits for the rich as against providing for the disinherited. And it marshals consent by scaring the daylights out of its own people.

Roosevelt said: "There is nothing to fear but fear itself." He might have added, "and unbridled selfishness and arrogance".

The Bush single-minded concentration on satisfying the greed of the few at the expense of the needs of the multitude is nowhere better expressed than in the so-called war on terror and the inhumanities and injustices which flow from that 'war'.

It was a truism, stated even by Bush himself, that the essence of defeat would be for the United States to yield its liberty and surrender its civilisation in the struggle. But it was clear from the start that this struggle against terror was a con. Declaring war against terror is declaring war against an abstraction, as many of us said at the time. It allows the president to pick and choose his enemies, without regard for anything that they might have done. And among those enemies, it transpired, were Free Speech and Justice.

Iraq was invaded on totally and now, admittedly false pretences for what South Sea Bubble prospectuses described as "purposes which will in due time be revealed". At the moment, the US is supposed to be bringing civilisation and the rule of law to a nation which is now horrified by tales of American depravity and outlawry.

It has allowed the US to intervene on the side of a few rich elites to decapitate the nascent Haitian democracy and to threaten Cuba with social 'improvements' which would turn that nation back 40 years.
Here in Jamaica, to demonstrate its complete control of our destinies, the US has decided to wreck what remains of our efforts at town planning by inserting its terrorist attracting embassy into the heart of a residential community - doing what Ariel Sharon says terrorists do - hiding behind innocent bystanders, using them as shields.

'We Pledge Our Word.'

John F Kennedy's inaugural speech, which we at the JBC broadcast live on January 20, 1961, electrified millions of people around the world when the new president promised to deal honourably with people like us. "To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom - and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside."

The tiger, of course, was the spectre of communism which dominated the waking thoughts of western statesmen. But people of goodwill then believed that eventually, even that obsession would go away. Kennedy held out his hand "to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction".

Kennedy had no intention of being a softie, of adopting any leftish position, but he recognised the madness of "both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war".

Kennedy proved he was no pushover in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and began the path which would lead to the de-escalation of nuclear menace, to nuclear non-proliferation treaties and to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty so cavalierly scrapped by President George Bush.

Bush's reasons: to free the United States from any apparent restrictions on the use of its power and to empower the military industrial complex against which, in his farewell speech in 1961, President Eisenhower warned so strongly:

The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Last year, I was one of millions round the world who marched in protest against the United States' plans to attack Iraq, in violation of international law, common sense and common decency. 'No blood for oil!', we said, but tens of thousands of Iraqis perished, plus nearly a thousand Americans and their allies, while the ranks of the terrorists and those who hate the United States have swelled beyond calculation.
In a column ten days after 9/11 I said:

Anyone who has studied the honeybee soon realises that bees make four types of cells: honeycomb cells and brood cells for Queens, Drones and Worker bees. Queen Bees lay the same eggs in every brood cell. Some cells are differently shaped and sized for Drones and Queens. When a hive loses a Queen it simply transfers an egg from a worker cell to a Queen cell, and presto, a new Queen. Queens go on laying eggs for life, once fertilised by a Drone.

Any human brain, fertilised by injustice, can, similarly produce a hero or a terrorist.

As the careers of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon demonstrate, the differences between them may not be visible to the naked eye.

While Mr Bush may see every justification for Mr Sharon's latest campaign in the Gaza Strip, and approve of his tanks, helicopter gunships and bulldozers, the Palestinians collectively punished by him may have very different ideas. Some of them, indeed, may be provoked into turning themselves into one-man armies - aka terrorists - to avenge their grievous injury.

Sharpening the Contradictions

In the same column in which I discussed the habits of bees, I also suggested that "Although a majority of Americans are now standing to attention and saluting the flag, many, I believe, would welcome a little more obvious moral and intellectual leadership from the White House. What they get instead is incitement to lynch law and racial war. Sooner or later, it will be obvious that Justice cannot be achieved that way."
That denouement has come sooner rather than later.

A majority of Americans now disapprove of Mr Bush's handling of the war, and as the heinous and depraved nature of the military response becomes more apparent, an even greater majority will develop. Mr Karl Rove - Mr Bush's so-called 'brain' - obviously believes that all of us - Americans and others - are fools who can be turned around by the expenditure of millions of dollars on misleading and untruthful advertisements. Their underhand methods of propaganda extend even to using taxpayers' money to pay for a campaign boosting their political version of Medicare. With the money at their disposal, the Republicans will do much more damage to American trust and national integrity before they are through.

The people they went to rescue in Iraq, are, according to a US Army-sponsored poll, 90 per cent against American presence in Iraq. And this was before the exposure of the torture regimes of Messrs Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cambrone.

The Bush war has sharpened the contradictions between the original American Dream (however inadequate) and the neo-fascist nightmare now being prepared for all of us. American conservatives are now beginning to understand what people like us in the developing world meant when we said that Globalisation was slavery by another name. In Iraq, the US Army is preparing to sacrifice its own slaves to save the necks of the elite. And, at last, even the corporate American media is awakening to an understanding of what is at stake.

The latest Abu Ghraib videos reportedly show American soldiers engaging in sex orgies in the sight of Iraqis they had just finished abusing. It may be depraved, but it is not unexpected. People whose civilised instincts are suppressed by intimidation or coercion are likely to express their alienation and distress in singularly inappropriate ways. They are as much victims as the people they had so recently and brutally victimised.

War is not a civilised pursuit. General George Patton 60 years ago had the courage to put into words the real depravity of war, whether conducted by Americans or anyone else:

. . .the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Now, an army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Saturday Evening Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about fornicating. Now we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world. You know. My God, I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against. My God, I do. We're not just going to shoot the bastards, we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.

Mr Bush said he wants to be known as a "war president". Little does he know.

The Politics of Ersatz Gentility

2005-05-22T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It wasn't a good week for US foreign policy, nor was it a good week for George Bush. It wasn't a good week for Jamaica and it certainly wasn't a good week for Haiti. But when last has Haiti had a good week?

In Jamaica, the fires of hysteria are burning bright. The private sector is shutting down business across Jamaica to protest against criminal violence. The criminals, no doubt, will be enormously impressed.

On Wednesday, the Haitians commemorated that day in 1803 when Dessalines finally managed to unite all the Haitian rebels under his leadership and a new flag.

Then began the final campaign to chase the French out of Saint Domingue and to establish the new nation of Haiti. For the first time at last, every man, woman and child was entitled to the fabled Rights of Man.

The French and the American colonists had declared that in their realms all were equal, although slavery persisted for years in French colonies and for nearly a century longer in the US.

It was the Haitians who abolished plantation slavery and recognised every human being - women and men - as equals in every respect. As I have argued before, that was a fatal mistake.

Thomas Jefferson, father of American democracy and father of several half-breed children by his black mistress, Sally Hemmings, was a genuine American gentleman who foresaw great danger if the contagion of black freedom were allowed to spread to the United States.

Facing the same sort of problem that Dwight Eisenhower faced in Cuba two centuries later, he took the same course and embargoed trade with the turbulent Caribbeans who spoke so eloquently of, and fought so determinedly for, freedom.

A hundred years later, another US secretary of state, the creationist William Jefferson Bryan, was astounded at "the idea of niggers speaking French". He, too, sent in the Marines to rule and create an army which was to abuse and terrorise the people of Haiti for most of the 20th century.

Nearly a century after that, Colin Powell (descendant of Jamaicans liberated in large part because the British feared another Haiti in Jamaica) sent troops in to kidnap the freely elected president of Haiti and to restore, once again, the rule of unlettered goons and their rich, infamous and elite sponsors.

As I write, the Haitian prime minister is caged without reason, charge or trial, on the point of death. He gives to his American, French and Canadian captors the same response Dessalines gave to the French two centuries ago: Liberty or Death!

Meanwhile, the American governor of Haiti, Ambassador Foley, backed by the racist troika of Bolton, Noriega and Reich, is busy pretending that he neither sees, hears nor smells any evil in Haiti, and he speaks no evil because he cannot speak at all without giving the game away.

In the United States, Noriega and Reich were last week frantically attempting damage control as elements of the normally quiescent and compliant press managed to summon the nerve to advise the president that, no, he really should not give asylum to one of the most notorious and bloody terrorists of the last century, Luis Posada Carriles.

Posada, having lain low, undisturbed, in Florida for two months, decided that the coast was clear and gave a press conference in Miami. That was the straw that spooked the official flacks and led to the authorities 'discovering' Posada's hidey-hole. They could have found it earlier had they thought to phone Havana.

It was in Havana, of course, where the best laid plans of Reich and Noriega were derailed. While they were suggesting to the press that, of course, the US would not extradite Posada (if he actually existed) to Venezuela because Venezuela was too close to Cuba, the Cubans were telling the world that they didn't want Posada; they simply wanted him to face justice in Venezuela where he had plotted his most heinous crime. Posada was a then member of Venezuela's secret police, and that connection and Otto Reich, then US ambassador to Venezuela, helped get him off the hook.

Reich is now in check, as it were, immobilised by Fidel Castro's successful campaign to expose the whole panorama of official lies, deceit and bloody violence in which Posada once freely operated.

And suddenly, there have also appeared people from Central America who can speak, with feeling, if not in agony, about Mr Posada's role in torturing them and others in the dirty wars of 20 years ago.

Mr Posada embodies the contradiction which most of the world sees in US foreign policy but which the US media, subscribing to some ersatz concept of civility and gentility, refuses to recognise.

Like Queen Victoria, they don't mind what the government does, as long as it doesn't do it in the street and frighten the consumers. And, as FDR said of Somoza, "He is a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch".

Newsflash: Christian eats Lions

Into this climate of denial, poisonous euphemism and hypocrisy last week strode a Scotsman, a member of the British parliament named George Galloway. He had been traduced by the chairman of the US Senate Sub-committee on Investigations, a rising right-wing star called Norm Coleman.

Coleman is determined to make a name for himself and he has played to the Republican radical right by abusing, among others, Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations.

Mr Coleman saw in the Oil for Food scandal the opportunity for months of headlines, although he was perfectly aware that a serious inquiry was already in progress under a man far better qualified than almost anybody to undertake such a task - Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

Mr Galloway was taunted by Mr Coleman when Galloway protested, from London, that the committee had not asked him anything about their so-called evidence before finding him guilty of fraud and consorting for money with the enemy. Mr Coleman, it seemed, was salivating at the prospect of Mr Galloway appearing before him to be exposed and shamed.

I remember, when I was about seven years old, my father telling me about Joe Louis, then the world heavyweight champion who the American press thought was going to be beaten on points if he fought Billy Conn, then the latest Great White Hope.

The conventional wisdom was that Conn would jab and run, jab and run, scoring points and compiling an unbeatable lead. Joe Louis, never the most communicative of men, was asked what he thought about that scenario. After a minute or two Louis opined: "He can run, but he can't hide."

Coleman was Billy Conn to Galloway's Joe Louis. Galloway went on the attack from the beginning, exposing what he called a schoolboy 'howler' in Coleman's evidence, which made it clear how ignorant Coleman was about the Oil for Food Programme.

He taunted Coleman, a former district attorney for his "cavalier attitude to the law". He denied the charges forcefully and made it obvious that they were based on the same manufactured evidence which had miraculously been unearthed in the chaos of Baghdad after the fall.

He went much further, attacking the smokescreen of lies behind which, he said, the United States policy was hiding. He launched into the Congress for not having the courage to expose the gigantic financial scandals of occupied Iraq, in which the US/coalition administration was unable to account for $8 billion in Iraqi money and hundreds of millions more absorbed by Halliburton. He was merciless and thorough, like Joe Louis in his destruction of Max Schmeling.

Throughout Mr Galloway's assault, Mr Coleman, his voice cracking occasionally, may have been wishing he were somewhere else. Nobody, it was clear, had ever spoken to him like that, although, as a lawyer, he should have realised that someone who is libelled has the right to fire back as vigorously and trenchantly as he chooses. After the drubbing was over, Coleman told reporters that he had questions about Mr Galloway's credibility.

For me, there were no questions about Mr Coleman's credibility. He had none. Mr Galloway was in his element as he said he had been an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and American governments and businessmen were selling the dictator guns and poison gas.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people, to their credit in your country, now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 have paid with their lives, 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies."

It was powerful stuff, accurate and important. But if most Americans hear about it it will probably be another generation, from their history books. In the Orwellian world of George Bush and the Republican party, freedom and truth are strictly relative.

The Administration condemns "abuses of human rights", especially in Cuba, while it supports a tyrant in Uzbekistan who has been known to boil his enemies alive. The US sends him suspected terrorists for questioning, ignoring his grisly record.

President Karimov and the US president's spokesman are both agreed that the opposition in Uzbekistan are terrorists. Just as Mr Posada was a freedom fighter, while people like Aristide and Yvon Neptune, if not terrorists are about as close as you can get.

And of course, Aristide, like George Galloway, was accused of high crimes and misdemeanour, which Mr Powell promised more than a year ago, were soon be exposed.

Aristide, like Saddam, has already been exposed. Mr Aristide has already been secretly photographed - like Saddam - in his underwear. That sort of exposure holds no terrors for him. The one thing that surprises me is that that photograph has not yet appeared on CNN.

The Devil's Cookroom

2005-05-15T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John maxwell

There is a small area of the Caribbean Sea, a few miles away from where I was born in Trelawny, which is marked on old maps as "The Devil's Cookroom". I imagine it got that name for the sudden, explosive storms which can develop there especially in winter.

But I have always thought that if the small patch of sea near Duncans deserved such a name how much more apt it would be applied to the entire Caribbean.

The Caribbean can probably claim a greater quantum of extreme human suffering over a longer time than anywhere else in the world. Millions of people were exterminated by the Spanish through ill-treatment and disease "they died in heaps, like bedbugs", Las Casas reported.

There was the Middle Passage with its bestial cruelty and slavery itself, degenerate and murderous, the brutal conquests of Central and South America on the same grisly pattern, and for five hundred years, slavery followed by colonial exploitation no less brutal or inhumane.

The paradoxes abound: Haiti, the first people in modern history to abolish slavery and to free themselves from the bonds of plantation colonialism, are now the most miserable and poorest, occupied by foreigners, ruled by psychopathic gangsters, convicted assassins, torturers and rapists.

Cuba, one of the last to abolish slavery, is now, unarguably, the most socially advanced, and, arguably the place in the world where people can claim to be most free.

Of course, freedom is different things to different people. Mr Bush declares that he is spreading freedom around the world, notably in Afghanistan and Iraq both now in the throes of civil war.

In Haiti, agents of American freedom are busy preparing "free and fair" elections while the lawful prime minister is unlawfully incarcerated and on the point of death from a hunger strike.

The lawfully elected president is seven time zones and half a world away in an exile planned, promoted and executed by the same people who are preparing those free and fair elections.

Meanwhile, the majority of the Haitian people, marching for their president's return, are butchered and tortured by elements who seem to be the moral descendants of Henry Morgan and his cutthroat brethren who looted and raped Cartagena, Porto Bello and Panama.

As Dr Pangloss was declaring at the time of the Haitian revolution - everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. As it was then, so it is now. Mr Bush now has the same kind of problem that Charles II had with Henry Morgan.

The King solved his problem by making Morgan a knight and Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. President Bush is unequivocal: those who harbour terrorists are terrorists and those who are not against terrorism are themselves terrorists. So what does one do when a committed, veteran terrorist makes a present of himself to the US government?

Declassified FBI documents say Mr Posada Carriles spent time working for the CIA and blame him for the bombing of a flight from Caracas to Havana via Guyana and Barbados. The bombing killed 73 people. Some call it Cuba's 9/11.

Posada Carriles hates Fidel Castro and has been plotting against him for more than 40 years, along with such partners as the CIA, the Mafia, the Iran Contra organiser, Oliver North and a host of others, some of distinguished ancestry and barnyard morality.

Mr Posada expects to be granted asylum by Mr Bush, as his equally murderous comrade in arms, Orlando Bosch, was granted a presidential pardon by the other President Bush.

He reasonably expects that after a lifetime of dirty work on behalf of well-heeled and important people, he should now be able to come in from the cold and live like a gentleman in Miami or somewhere else in Florida, where he has lots of friends, including many in very high places.

However, as the New York Times and other important newspapers around the world have pointed out, Mr Posada is a professional terrorist, trained, like Mr Bin Laden, by the CIA.

According to the Cubans, former US undersecretary Otto Reich got Posada out of prison in Venezuela in the '80s and no less an intermediary than Colin Powell paved the way for his pardon in Panama last year. In Panama, Posada was jailed for plotting to blow up an entire auditorium of students in order to kill Fidel Castro.

The Cubans allege that the former president of Panama, Mrs Meyrel Moscoso, was given US$4 million and a Lincoln Town car to sign pardons for Posada and his criminal associates on the day she demitted office.

The Cubans say Posada was flown from Panama in an unmarked plane to Honduras where he remained for months until he slipped away in a fishing boat sent by one of his rich Cuban patrons in Miami.

The Cubans say that Otto Reich's successor, Mr Noriega, oversaw Posada's translation to the US, although Mr Noriega strenuously denies that the United States has any idea where Mr Posada might be. This is strange, since any application for asylum must state the applicant's actual legal address.

The San Francisco Chronicle asks - "When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When he's an anti-Castro "freedom fighter'' hiding in Florida. The White House should lose no time in deporting Luis Posada Carriles, a prime suspect in the midair bombing of a civilian airliner that killed 73 people in 1976. It was a terrorist act by any definition."

The New York Times (NYT) concurs: "The one thing the Bush administration cannot do is to shelter Mr Posada by granting him political asylum.

"Since 9/11, the United States has become so zealous in its efforts to exclude potential terrorists from American soil that it has made it much harder for genuine refugees fleeing deadly persecution in their home countries to find sanctuary here. Washington would offend American principles and set an extremely damaging precedent by making a special exception for an admitted terrorist"

The NYT demands a single standard for terrorists, despite the risks of "retribution at the polls from a ferociously anti-Castro Cuban-American community that has helped swing Florida into the Republican column in recent elections".

Venezuela has now officially demanded Posada's extradition. Hopefully, that may happen before Mr Posada dies either of old age or of one of those unfortunate accidents to which septuagenarians are so susceptible.

Neither the NYT nor any other major US news agency considers that the situation in Haiti may, as the Times puts it, "offend American standards".

Caricom has piously declared its concern but champions of freedom and human rights like the Prime Minister of Jamaica (Patterson) and Barbados (Owen Arthur) have been conspicuously silent, no doubt because they have ceased to be young, gifted or black.

Next week, supporters of constitutional legitimacy and human rights in Haiti will be making a special effort on Wednesday, May 18, to bring the noxious situation there to world attention. I am scheduled to be the host of HOT 102's Disclosure programme that day and I will be happy to discuss Haiti if you are minded to telephone me.

In the meantime I ask you to consider the appeal by Haiti's President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, speaking from exile in South Africa to the courageous American journalist Amy Goodman on Democracy (http://www.democracynow.org/) a few days ago.

"It is very sad what we have as information about our Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune. He is still in hunger strike. How long he will be able to survive, we don't know. That's why we grasp this opportunity to ask everybody who can do something to not hesitate, because it is a matter of life and death. We need to save his life.

"We need many, many voices to equal the voices of Haiti. The people of Haiti want life and not death. They want peace and not violence. They want democracy and not repression.. Whoever can say something, whoever can do something, please do it, because the Haitian people right now are waiting for your help.

"You arrest someone, as they did with Minister Pivert, So Ann and so many others - there are hundreds who are in jail - there is no basis, no legal basis for that. But they just put them in jail because they have power with them, weapons with them, support of the United States, France, Canada, some others. . .it's a matter of life and death. We need many voices to put that truth out and see finally if they can pay attention to that and save his life.

"Today, those who kidnapped me and continue to support those criminals while they're killing innocent people, while they keep Yvon Neptune the way he is, clearly they maintain the black holocaust. The United States, France, Canada and so many others should do something to repair, if they can, what they did.

"Because what they did is a crime. The same way slavery is a crime against humanity, the same way what they're doing against the Haitian people, it's also a crime. And all of that [is] maintaining a black holocaust in Haiti."

They already killed more than 10,000 people. Can you imagine Cité Soleil, where people need food, not violence; where people need work, jobs, not violence? And we have tanks surrounding Cité Soleil, as if it were a concentration camp.

God, can you imagine what we have in Bel Air? Can you imagine what we have in so many popular areas, poor areas where they continue to kill people while people are asking for the respect of their votes? They voted for democracy, as our forefathers fought for our independence in 1804..

"But there is clearly a small minority in Haiti with their allies in foreign countries. Together, they said no to elections, because they knew once they respect the will of the people in a democratic way through free, fair democratic elections, then they will not be able to continue to live in a country where they don't pay tax, where they still have the wall of apartheid.

"Once we keep the line of peace, of nonviolence, we will win, because peace must be the way to go towards the victory. And love from my heart to all our friends, because we have many friends who love Haiti, who are trying to do their best to help the people of Haiti.

Of course, sharing that love, this is one way for me to express deep respect to them and also renewing my commitment to move with all of them in order to build, slowly but surely, a civilisation of love."

Shaken . . . and Stirred

2005-05-08T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

There must be something about being a recovering social democrat that makes it impossible for some politicians to understand what politics is supposed to be about. In Jamaica, for instance, Mr Patterson has just recently discovered that the country is literally dying for an education programme which will improve the ordinary child's prospects of growing up to be a useful member of society.

After 14 years as prime minister, he has just announced a crash programme which might, in ten years or so, depress the level of delinquency and death among the least privileged in our society. In some ways Mr Patterson is not quite as bad as Mr Tony Blair.

On Friday night, after two terms as Prime Minister of the British, he announced that he had been taught a lesson: from now on, he pledged, he would listen to his constituents - "I. we. the government are going to focus relentlessly now on the priorities the people have set for us."

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a convenient word to express the process by which a decent, rational human being is transformed from being a democratic socialist into being a zombie? It would be great to find a word like 'denazification' for example, or 'de-Ba'athification' (as in Iraq)?

Perhaps we should ask the World Bank - our all-purpose intellectual provisioner - for a word. They have published treatises against 'Populism' - apparently a notifiable disease involving listening to people and respecting their choices.

The apostles of globalisation like the World Bank and the OECD would appear to believe that it is rational to accept the people's decision in electing you, but that anything they decide after that is irrational, irrelevant and unimportant. Which of course brings me back to Mr Blair.

Almost exactly two years ago the British people, like a majority of people round the world, even including the Americans, were dead set against war. We marched in protest demonstrations in our millions, so impressing the New York Times that it declared that there were now two world superpowers, the United States and world public opinion.

Unfortunately, the other superpower did not listen to us and Mr Blair defied a million marching citizens in his own capital and millions more who thought that he and Mr Bush were leading the world down a garden path designed by Hieronymus Bosch and Edvard Münch.

Before the assault, Iraq had been subject to a debilitating decade of starvation rations, sanctions and intermittent bombing which one American general said had reduced the likely military targets in Iraq to a few outhouses.

We now know that Messrs Bush and Blair, months before anyone else knew what they were up to, were cooking up plans for 'regime change' in Iraq - a wholly illegal enterprise under the laws of the UK, the US and International law.

As we now know, the Americans promised the British that they would sex-up the intelligence sufficiently to deceive the United Nations into giving them an excuse to carry out their barbarous adventure. The British went as far as alleging that the evil genius Saddam Hussain had the capacity, within 45 minutes, to visit destruction on whomsoever he chose.

The scenarios were awesome, shocking, horrific and, unbelievable. We now know that - as we thought then - it was all a pack of lies, the biggest con job in the history of mankind, designed to fulfil Mr Cheney's still secret plans to conquer and divide the Middle East for the greater good of the oil companies of the world, the United States and Israel.

EATING CROW

On Friday night in his own constituency Mr Blair had to listen, teeth clenched, as a retired ambulance driver, Mr Reg Keys, denounced the Prime Minister for sending his 20 year-old son to be killed in an illegal war. Mr Keys, a total unknown, had decided to oppose the Prime Minister in his own constituency, to protest against the PM's behaviour.

Most people expected that Mr Keys would get a few charity votes. He got more than 4,000 and those votes he said, "sent a clear and resounding message against the war". He was right.

The New Labour 'spinmeisters' are busy trying to minimise the truth. According to them, the war was only one of several factors operating against Labour, and no doubt some will soon say that the really decisive factor was voter fatigue.

People had got so used to voting for Labour that many of them simply took a break. The important factors were quite simply the war and Mr Blair's shredded credibility.

Unfortunately among the facts that proved the 'spinmeisters' wrong is one named George Galloway. Mr Galloway is a Scotsman, a Labour member of parliament who had met Saddam Hussain several times in relation to an Iraq-connected charity run by Galloway.

Galloway is a man who, as we say in Jamaica, pays no licence for his mouth. His enemies decided that the war was as good an excuse as any to wound him fatally and get rid of this nuisance forever.

According to the Daily Telegraph and other newspapers in Britain and the US, documents found in the rubble of Baghdad "revealed" that Mr Galloway had been on Saddam's payroll, had made millions off the Oil For Food programme, making him corrupt as well as unpredictable.

Unfortunately for his enemies, Mr Galloway has managed to clear himself and his reputation, being able to prove that the documents were forged. Before that, however, the New Labourites had expelled Mr Galloway from their party.

He decided to fight back and decided to do this by standing for election in Bethnal Green, one of the poorest parts of London, where nearly half the electorate is Muslim with a solid record of voting for Labour. Mr Galloway had represented a constituency 700 miles away from London, in Glasgow, Scotland.

On Friday night, to the shock and awe of millions, Mr Galloway succeeded in overturning a Labour majority of 10,000 votes and won the seat against a dedicated 'Blair Babe', a mixed-race Jewish barrister named Oona King. In his victory speech, George Galloway, as is his habit, went straight to the point.

"This is for Iraq," he began. "Mr Blair, this defeat is for Iraq, and the other defeats that New Labour has received this evening are for Iraq. All the people you have killed and all the loss of life have come back to haunt you and the best thing that the Labour Party can do is sack you."

But Bethnal Green wasn't Labour's worst defeat. In Wales, in the constituency which was probably the safest Labour seat in Britain, one of the first seats won by Labour after the party was formed, a seat once held by Aneurin Bevan and after him by Michael Foot, a member of the Labour party bolted the party because Mr Blair had decided to impose his own candidate on the constituency.

The rebel, a man with an impeccable record as a Labour councillor but now running as an independent, routed the official candidate. In London, the Liberal Democrats, now to the left of Labour, uprooted some Labour stalwarts, in one case, nearly doubling their vote in a swing of over 25% - unheard of in British politics.

The Labour party is back in office with a reduced majority and the Conservatives, the main Opposition party, increased their seats to a respectable figure (197 seats against 351 for Labour). Although they have increased their seats, there was hardly any swing at all to them - about one half of one per cent. They benefited by the haemorrhage of Labour votes to the Liberal Democrats, mainly in protest against the war.

The real winners were the Liberal Democrats, formed in the 1970s by a fusion between the old Liberal party and the breakaway right wing of the Labour Party.

THE LAST EFFLORESCENCE

This provenance makes it all the more remarkable that the LibDems are now seen as the alternative to Labour - and the left alternative at that. They were against the war and, generally, espouse a more 'populist' programme than either of the other parties.

The chastening of Tony Blair is a defeat for George Bush every bit as important as the defeat of Aznar in Spain. He is a lame duck; in fact, he is a legless duck, open to pressure now from nearly 100 leftish members of his own party plus the invigorated LibDems with their 60 seats. If these ever combine with the nearly 200 Tories, Blair will be pinned. Politics has once again reared its lovely head in Britain and all bets are off.

With Blair's freedom of action now limited, Mr Bush will find his parliamentary opposition not in Washington, but in London, and that may perhaps help invigorate the forces for change and civilisation in the United States.

There are already signs that the Creationist mobocracy are not having things their own way. Mr DeLay seems to be swinging slowly in the wind and the democratic forces seem to be gaining strength, enthusiasm and most important, boldness.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas is effectively dead, the Central American Free Trade Area is likely to be stillborn and the Doha Round of the WTO is suffering from oxygen starvation.

People round the world are beginning to realise that we don't have to be bullied if we don't want to be, and that there are effective ways of resistance apart from and distinct from terrorism.

The rest of us - the force described as the other superpower - suffers from disorganisation and a lack of awareness of our own strength. But as the strength grows, so will the awareness. Pundits find it easy to speak of watersheds, and thankfully, none has yet called this one. I believe it really is a watershed, for a number of reasons.

I see the Thatcher era as the last flowering of the Tories, rather like the enormous efflorescence of the "Century Palm" before it dies. The so-called Thatcher-Reagan revolution was not the dawn of a new era, but the last spasm of a culture in a frantic effort to turn back the tides of history and civilisation.

Blair and Bush are the last fruits of that efflorescence.

Naked to their Enemies

2005-05-01T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It may very well have something to do with the very thin ozone layer prevailing this year, allowing the earth to be bathed in excessive ultraviolet radiation, threatening malignant melanoma for those with fair skins. Our destructive past is catching up with us and the poisons we have excreted into the environment are coming back to haunt us.

But I do wonder if it is the ozone layer which is also stripping away the glaze from the eyes of some of us, and, at an absolutely astonishing rate, revealing the nakedness of our emperors and the pathetic figures they cut once the gilt has been removed.

Take the Mexican Emperor, for instance, Vicente Fox. EL Presidente was last week forced to backtrack and effectively apologise for his government's part in attempting to get rid of its most dangerous opponent, the Mayor of Mexico City, Lopez Obrador.

It probably doesn't harm Mr Lopez Obrador that his (mother's) name is a Spanish word for worker (trabajador is more usual) and that he is a hard and diligent worker. He has become immensely popular in Mexico City for the job he has done as mayor. When his opponents decided to remove him from the presidential race, they could not have known that they would instead, spread his renown across Mexico and into the wider world.

Lopez Obrador is a social democrat, which in American eyes is next to being a 19th century nihilist. President Fox may have thought he was doing his sometime compadre, G W Bush a favour by landing Obrador with a criminal prosecution.

Obrador was accused of a minor, technical and utterly unimportant violation of an obscure land law regulating the process by which municipalities could acquire land for public purposes. But, with a criminal prosecution hanging round his neck, no matter how trifling, Lopez Obrador was barred from being a candidate.

The uproar the government's action caused produced protest around the world as well as in Mexico, and the mayor's profile is now higher than ever, because he not only forced El Presidente to back down, but brought down the attorney-general who prosecuted him, a candidate for the ruling party's presidential nomination.

THE INEFFABLE TONY BLAIR

Prime Minister Tony Blair (right) and Jack Straw
Tony Blair is a barrister who became leader of the British Labour Party just as the British were getting fed up to the teeth with Margaret Thatcher. He was one of those people who believed that if you can't beat your opponent, you should steal his clothes, dry clean them and proclaim them NEW! BRILLIANT!! SEXY!!!

He tried but didn't quite succeed in burying Labour's old working class clothes. He paraded his newness, his grand piano smile, his lack of ideology and his love affair with GW Bush.

Unfortunately for this Emperor Manqué, his touching faith in the Transatlantic Templar from Texas led him into indiscretion, most notoriously, into war with Iraq, or rather, into a criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes.

Aggressive war is a crime, according to the Nuremberg rules. Tony Blair thought he had hoodwinked his British public and the world when he claimed, falsely as it turned out, as most of us suspected, that the war was illegitimate.

In those days, Blair brandished before Parliament advice from his attorney-general saying it licenced him to go to war. As a lawyer he should have remembered two things: one, that no one can give you permission to commit an illegal act; two, that in this day, this age of instant communication, nothing can long remain secret.

On Friday, the pressure of public opinion aroused by the election campaign and concerted by the media forced Blair to publish the full text of the Attorney-General's Opinion, all 13 pages of it, and it strips the gloss from Blair's claims.

Alas for Blair, his embrace of the Bushian principles convinced him to disregard the very lawyerly advice in the Opinion. The Opinion makes it clear that the attorney-general did not give much for the chances of Blair proving in court that the assault on Iraq was justifiable.

It could have been justified, said the AG, if Blair and Bush had been able to persuade the Security Council to pass another resolution threatening Iraq with war, unless... The Security Council, remember, would have no truck with that. Old Europe, as Generalissimo Rumsfeld so appositely remarked, was out of the loop of Bushian reality.

So they went to war. And we, who were vilified for protesting in our millions round the world against the planned aggression, have been proved to have been right from the start.
It is an enormously satisfying feeling which cannot, however, balance against all the hurt and suffering caused.

Mr Blair has shredded his reputation. It is possible and British commentators think it probable that the Labour Party will still win this week's election. The voters, they think, will hold their noses long enough to vote Labour, since they know that Gordon Brown stands ready to take charge if the prime minister, for some unforeseen reason, should feel too 'indisposed' to continue.

THE ORWELLIAN GEORGE BUSH

The American Emperor has been able for so long to give the impression that he can walk on water that he probably thinks he can really do it. As Jay Bookman points out on Thursday in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mr Bush arrived at his apogee on March 21, just a month ago, when the President signed a bill authorising federal court intervention in the sad case of Terry Schiavo.

Bookman says, and I agree with him: "By over-reaching so badly in that case, Republicans gave many Americans a fresh appreciation of the dangers of unchecked government arrogance, not to mention a renewed respect for the checks and balances needed to restrain that arrogance.

And when Republican leaders began to attack federal judges as part of their holy crusade against the only government branch beyond their control, what had been a vague and growing unease began to coalesce into a deep distrust."

It couldn't have come at a worse time, Bookman points out, because the numbers have begun to run against the administration. Most Americans don't think the federal judges are too liberal as the GOP says - 52% think they are just about right, while 16% think they are too conservative.

Only 25% agreed with Bush and his crusaders. In the same poll, 66% of Americans rejected the Republican jihad in the Senate, the so-called nuclear option to change the congressional rules to elevate some real Neanderthals to the federal bench.

And, to quote Bookman again, "on critical issues from Iraq to energy to the economy and social security, enough time has passed to see the results of Bush's ideology driven policies and it isn't pretty".

The Dow has fallen 800 points in six weeks, and 61% of Americans think the economy is getting worse. In the same poll, nearly 60% of respondents disapproved of Bush's policy in Iraq and 54% think the war is a waste of time. A Gallup poll disclosed that 60% of Americans now recognise that Bush deliberately lied them into war.

The impressive pantheon of the Bush Reich is shedding its tiles. The Senate majority leader is under attack for his ineptitude and his grovelling to the religious right. The Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, the pretentious Tom De Lay, is in serious danger of ending up in jail.

The man who led the moral assault against Bill Clinton is rapidly turning into a political leper, an untouchable.

OUR INVISIBLE PRIME MINISTER

It's long been obvious to me, if to no one else, that as soon as our Jamaican Prophet-Emperor was exposed to the harsh glare of political reality, his charms would melt like ice cream on a hot sidewalk.

Like the other Emperors, he has not had a good week. This week Portia Simpson finally got her way and, over the howls (one imagines) of the Prime Minister's Praetorian Guard, she got rid of the entire board of the National Solid Waste Authority, touts porous, or whole hog, as we used to say.

What the latest 'bangarang' reveals is how few people it takes to run this country. I once declared that Mr Neville Athenaeum wore so many hats that it was impossible to know which one he was talking through at any given time.

Alston Stewart, Kingsley Thomas, Dennis Morrison and Vin Lawrence make Athenaeum look like a piker. Stewart, the chairman of the NSWA, has his own businesses plus a radio station, KLAS, to manage as well. And managing a radio station is one of the world's most thankless jobs, reportedly akin to herding cats.

In spite of all these serious jobs, Mr Stewart was project manager for the government's mega-project at Sandals Whitehouse, the mismanagement of which will probably become a case study in the annals of hotel construction.

Butch Stewart (no kin), a man who operates and has built hotels in several places inside and outside of Jamaica, told me on Disclosure (Hot102, Wednesday, April 26) that he had never seen so much confusion. And, despite the fact that he is a shareholder in the project management company set up for the purpose, he was usually completely in the dark about what was going on.

On Breakfast Club the day before, the Supreme Grand Panjandrum in Chief, Dr the Hon Vin Lawrence, expressed surprise that Stewart had not known the true state of affairs. The cost of building the hotel had jumped from $60 million to $73 million and is now somewhere near double the original estimate, it appears. But who knows?

Dr Omar Davies, the minister of finance, has decided to get, if he can, to the bottom of this barrel of worms. One wishes him luck. It will be interesting to know what this latest disaster will eventually cost the taxpayer so that someday we might have some idea of what Mr Patterson's primacy has cost us.

The PM himself in what was expected to have been a triumphant farewell budget speech was his usual unexciting self. His speech might have been titled "Better late than never" as he announced, in the gloaming of his final year as leader of this country, that he will be using money from the Housing Trust to spruce up a few schools.

Instead, as he did not remind us, we have spent our not inconsiderable credit on grand and futile schemes, rescuing the bankers, building the Doomsday Highway and last, the monumental beach-stealing exercise which will forever rid ordinary Jamaicans of the onerous duty of going sea-bathing.

As Jamaicans say, when you have to jump off a cliff to get into the water, what you have to worry about "is not the drop; is the sudden stop".

The Company They Keep

2005-04-24T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

I had the luxury of listening to an entire BBC World programme by direct telephone link from London last week. The programme was Talking Point, and I had phoned the BBC in answer to their invitation to ask questions of Mark Malloch Brown, the chief of staff of the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The BBC kindly phoned me back and enquired what was my question? It was about Haiti, I said. I was put on to somebody else, who, like everyone else in this tale, was charming to a fault. I explained that I wanted to ask Malloch Brown about human rights in Haiti.

Well, they weren't sure that they would get round to that subject since the programme was really about UN reform. Some of it was, but there were several questions, from questioners who had obviously joined after me, about subjects like human rights in Darfur, the Congo and so on.

As I suspected, I never got to speak to Malloch Brown, although various people from time to time enquired whether I was 'still there'. I must say that I most unworthily had suspected, soon after the charade began, that I was never going to be allowed to ask Mr Malloch Brown my question. I kept on waiting, however, until the end of the programme.

The Haitian people have been waiting for justice for 200 YEARS. Last week, the UN Security Council paid a visit to Haiti, ostensibly to see what was going on down there, to "review progress achieved in areas such as security, development, the political transition, human rights, institution-building and the humanitarian situation".

In a statement issued a month ago, the council said the following, inter alia:

"Assistant Secretary-General Hédi Annabi on major developments in Haiti since 18 November, 2004.

Mr Annabi stressed that since the outbreak of violence last year much has been achieved in Haiti, thanks to the Haitian people and the support provided by the international community.

The fact that the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has almost reached its fully authorised strength level has substantially enhanced its capacity to respond to security threats, producing noticeable results and thus contributing to the improvement of the security situation in the country, including through joint operations with the Haitian National Police."

As I write, I have heard not a word of the results of the Security Council's mission to Haiti. I presume that they had a good time - good food is available in French restaurants, the beaches are beautiful and uncrowded, and the thugs who rule Haiti tolerate no barking dogs or any other kind of dissent.

The UN Security Council and its boss, Mr Bush, must be well pleased. I wonder which PR agency can be credited for this coup?

The people of Haiti, on the other hand, are not satisfied. They allege that the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) has simply provided reinforcements and legitimacy for the thugs who rule Haiti.

The Haitian Lawyers Leadership (HLL), for instance, suspects that the current MINUSTAH campaign to pacify the slums is really aimed at targeting Lavalas supporters, Aristide supporters and in particular, a resistance leader called Emmanuel "Dread" Wilme.

The HLL believes that what will happen is a replay of the US Marines' murder of the Caco resistance leader, Charlemagne Peralte, in the first full-scale occupation in 1919.

Dread Wilme is described by HLL as "the armed suspect accused of defending pro-Lavalas people in Cite Soleil against paid police enforcers like Labanye, the ex-military, renegade police and paramilitary.

Defending pro-Lavalas against systematic and state-sponsored terror is the alleged crime and logic for the current UN offensive and cordoning off of Cité Soleil residents to hunt for Emmanuel Wilme".

"Like Charlemagne Peralte, Emmanuel "Dread" Wilme, may be summarily executed by foreign troops and dragged, as a trophy, through the streets of Haiti to cow the peaceful demonstrators who are demanding return of the constitutional government; to demoralise, to "shock and awe" the Haitian poor with the overwhelming, unjust and illegal power of foreign troops in Haiti."

The Haitian people have been through purgatory, courtesy of the US, several times. Since the occupation, they have endured the Duvaliers, Cedras and other criminal puppets who brutalised their way to power and wealth.

So, what else is new?

Here in Jamaica, the Government of this sovereign sister to Haiti, the Government which owes some of its genesis to Dessalines and the Haitian people, is now preparing to send back to their Haitian murderers, the people who have fled from the thugs who now govern regnant and rampant Haiti.

The excuse is that the UN Human Rights Commission has run out of money for this humanitarian project. So, while we can lose billions of dollars in crazy make-wealth-for-capitalist schemes, we cannot spare half-a-million Jamaican dollars a month to prevent a few hundred people from being raped, scalped, beaten to death and otherwise forced to end their support for the lawfully elected president of Haiti.

It has not occurred to our Government of the formerly 'young, gifted and black' to seek help from South Africa or the African Union. As in 1994, we are simply consigning the refugees to their fates - whatever that may be.

We are imbued with brotherly love but, it seems, we can't find any brothers to love. We are part of the wealth-seeking consensus, the globalisation-seeking consensus, and because of this, we will soon be subsidising American universities with millions of Jamaican dollars because of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), as predicted nearly a decade ago.

The US universities have awoken to the easy pickings available in Jamaica, and their sole ventures and joint ventures with Jamaican 'sucker institutions' are going to do their little bit toward cutting the US trade imbalance.

Two cheers for Progress!!

President Aristide has recently been appointed by President Mbeki of South Africa to be that country's ambassador to the African Diaspora, in addition to his job as president of Haiti. A few days ago, President Aristide appealed to the world to help his country out of its misery.

As he pointed out: "In 1994, who could have expected free, fair and democratic elections in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo and other leaders and members of the African National Congress in jail, exile and hiding?"

In a direct challenge to the misbegotten Security Council position on Haiti, President Aristide asked: "Today in 2005, who can expect free, fair and democratic elections in Haiti with thousands of Lavalas in jail, exile and hiding?"

"To repair the tragic mistake of the February 2004 kidnapping and coup d'etat and reverse the disastrous events that it unleashed, the following steps must be taken:

Thousands of Lavalas supporters who are in jail and in exile must be free to return home.
The repression that has already killed over 10,000 people must end immediately.
There must be national dialogue.
Free, fair and democratic elections must be organised in an environment where the huge majority of Haitian people are neither excluded nor repressed as they have been up until today.

"Their continued peaceful demonstrations calling for my return and the restoration of constitutional order must be heard. Racism should not maintain a "Black holocaust" in Haiti where African descendants proclaimed their independence 200 years ago. What an historic paradigm for all the nations!" Indeed.

An Author Of The Black Holocaust

One of the architects of the Bush policy towards lesser breeds without the law, such as Haiti, Cuba and ourselves, is Mr John Bolton. He was the lawyer who infamously walked into a Florida counting office in 2000 and announced that he was there to stop the recount.

He and others such as our recently departed ambassador, were part of the legal phalanx which won Florida, the United States and the World, for Mr G W Bush, as he was then. For such important work, he has to be properly rewarded, but he had to wait for his desserts until the dust apparently died down. But John Bolton has never been a man to lie low.

It was he who decided, all on his own, that if Cuba was not producing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, she was on the point of doing so to supply them to terrorists around the world.

It took a delegation led by former President Jimmy Carter to nail that lie, but it was disproved eventually, unlike some other whoppers told by Bolton's elders and betters.

Bolton is notorious for his denigration of the United Nations, so when President Bush, as he now is, decided to reward his loyal henchman, where more appropriate (in the Bushian sense) to send him than to the United Nations.

The move has the same kind of lunatic logic as would putting a convicted child molester in charge of an orphanage, or a pyromaniac in charge of the fire brigade.

Perhaps fortunately for the rest of us, some of the people Mr Bolton has dissed on his way up are beginning to speak out about the character of the man. He turns out to be a bully of extraordinary vengefulness, chasing one USAID contractor halfway across former Soviet East Asia because she wouldn't do what he wanted her to do.

He tried to get various civil servants fired because they disagreed with his idiosyncratic view of America's enemies. To put it mildly, he is a thoroughly noxious specimen and a danger to world peace.

He is a former sidekick of the notorious Otto Reich, himself formerly the gauleiter (or perhaps Tetrarch) of our part of the Third World. Both are the intellectual spawn of that dedicated racist, Jesse Helms, the former senator from South Carolina.

No one knows how Otto Reich's pet terrorist, Jose Posada Carriles, made his way back into the United States where he is now seeking political asylum. But in my perhaps prejudiced mind, Reich and Bolton and other members of the Florida vigilantes must somehow be responsible for the return of this convicted murderer and terrorist.

Whatever happens to Mr Bolton's nomination, and it now seems doomed to implode, we can, I am sure, expect more action in these parts designed to prove that we do not deserve to be counted as people with commonly recognised human rights.

Clearly, regimes which can tolerate the impunity of Posada Carriles, the imminent trial of Haiti's former minister of justice, the forced return of refugees and the hunting down of people for their politics cannot believe that Haitians, Jamaicans and Cubans deserve to be treated according to the Conventions of Geneva or The Hague or, for that matter, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Let Them Eat Statistics

2005-04-17T00:00:00.000+02:00

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!

Don't Blame the Youth

2005-04-10T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

We can always 'take back the streets' - but we will have to keep taking them back over and over. The conquest of the Canterbury slum in Montego Bay, Tawes Pen in Spanish Town, August Town or West Kingston will never be concluded by force of arms. Those of us who believe that love rather than guns is the way to change the world really do have some ammunition, and wonder of wonders, some of it is supplied by the World Bank.

For one who regards the World Bank and the IMF as the moral equivalent of the Black Death, I must say that the bank, at least, does make sense from time to time. While its outgoing head, Mr James Wolfensohn, thought that corruption was the most important negative factor in development, and while the bank's policies will keep it in the poverty eradication business for another millennium, some of its less publicly important people do really useful work.

Where the World Bank makes sense is in its research. During the regime of Joe Stiglitz as chief economist, the bank began some important initiatives in extending its knowledge base. The results don't seem to have reached the bank's clients, although some of us might be vastly improved by reading some of the material the bank has published.

Michael Manley and the PNP fought the 1972 general election and won mainly on the issue of reducing crime and violence. Three decades later, Manley's successor, P J Patterson, presides over a country in which nearly five times as many people are being murdered as in 1972 and thousands more are maimed every year. Mr Patterson and his minister of national security Dr Phillips have an answer to all this. We must take back the streets.

According to the World Bank, it may be more appropriate to think of recapturing hearts and minds. They don't use that language, of course.

My references to Canterbury and Tawes Pen were provoked by re-reading two bank documents to which I have referred in past columns. The first is Caribbean Youth Development: Issues and Policy Directions; the other is Determinants of Crime Rates in Latin America and the World.

They are both downloadable from the World Bank's website or others which Google can find for you. The bank's researchers are on the side of the peacemakers - the softies like us who believe that there can be no winners in the class war.

In their paper on the determinants of crime, the World Bank researchers analysed mountains of data from all over the world to come to some conclusions which may seem obvious to some of us, but not at all obvious to our rulers.

First, the researchers understand that criminal activity is a matter of rational choice for potential criminals. They then examine the factors which motivate people to engage in criminal activity - the incentives which persuade people to crime.

They found that income inequality is perhaps the most important factor: economic downturns and other non-economic shocks can raise the crime rate and maintain it at levels unacceptable to societies. Their calculations leave the researchers in no doubt that there are rational economic incentives propelling people toward crime.

If you are at the bottom of society, where a criminal record means nothing adverse, you have nothing to lose by robbing or stealing. The greater the gap between the robber and his target, the more incentive there is for robbery, the greater the likelihood of a good return. The greater the gap between the top and the bottom of society, the greater the incentive to raid the rich. It is not so much poverty that motivates criminals as it is inequity and injustice.

The researchers - Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman and Norman Loayza - will justly be pained at the crudity of my presentation of their very sophisticated analysis. All I can offer as excuse is that there is not enough space to treat their work more fairly. I suggest you try to get hold of the document.

The second document, Caribbean Youth Development: Issues and Policy Directions, is perhaps even more important. It makes some astonishing claims and, in my opinion, appears to prove them. One such claim is that a reduction in youth crime of one per cent would directly increase tourism receipts in Jamaica by four per cent.

If that doesn't stun you, you should be investing in the Doomsday Highway.

The lead author of this study, Orsalia Kazantopoulos, says that risky adolescent behaviour in the Caribbean costs us 'billions of dollars. in terms of direct expenditures and forgone productivity" due to crime and HIV/AIDS.

This study, in my view, is clearly justified in proposing that "Investment in preventing any one of these [risky youth behaviours] would have great returns for the country, particularly in the form of higher productivity."

Here are a few of the points made in the study:

In terms of foregone benefits, a single cohort of adolescent mothers in St Kitts is estimated to cost US$2 million; St Kitts has less than a tenth of the population of Jamaica.
Youth crime and violence in St Lucia generates more than US$3 million in lost benefits to society and US$10 million in lost benefits to private individuals, annually.
If female youth unemployment in Jamaica were reduced to the level of adult unemployment, GDP in Jamaica would rise 2.9 per cent.

Much better returns than the Doomsday Highway.

Youth is not the Problem

The report is unequivocal: Youth is not the problem. We already know that in our hearts, but many of us may only be convinced now that the World Bank says so. What is astonishing is how important the human touch is in achieving real development - development of people instead of concrete.

The report examines the main causes for risky and expensive youth behaviour. It finds these in broken families, broken and inadequate school systems, poverty and gender. These conclusions are not seat-of-the-pants guesses; they are backed by solid research.

"A key message arising out of the research findings is the interconnectedness of facts that predispose risky behaviour and outcomes. (Emphasis in original) Empirical analysis of risk and protective factors carried out using the nine-country Caricom data demonstrates that complex interrelations among family, school and community factor in the micro-environment. Study results show that changing any one of the risk factors will improve outcomes. The findings are consistent with international evidence."

What we need to do

The report also suggests a variety of low-tech solutions, many of which resemble what N W Manley began with Jamaica Welfare nearly 70 years ago.

Reform the educational system and maximise the protective effects of schools by improving access and retention, improving the quality of education, eliminating corporal punishment, using educational campaigns to reduce violence and promote conflict resolution; and institutionalising permanent school-based information and education campaigns on sexual abuse and exploitation.
Upgrading the public health system;
Institutionalising national level mentoring systems for youth at risk;
Reforming and strengthening legal, judicial and police systems by improving juvenile justice, increasing the control of weapons and reforming the police;
Using the media and social marketing to change norms and values related to key risk areas - sexual abuse and exploitation; early sexual initiation; corporal punishment; physical abuse; alcohol consumption; and drug use;
Making families and fathers a top public policy issue - putting in place measures to make parents more responsible for their children by legal measures and tax breaks and to use the education system, the public health system and the media to teach fundamental parenting skills; and finally;
Strengthening community and neighbourhood supports to adolescents and their families by establishing youth funds to finance innovative NGO and community-based initiatives for youth.

Again, as in the case of the document on crime, I cannot in this space do anything like justice to the World Bank report.

I believe that the Jamaican and Caribbean media should jump on these documents and air them thoroughly so that people armed with relevant facts for the first time at last, can begin a real dialogue about some of the fundamental things wrong with this society.

What I find so compelling about these two documents, and what I think you will find if you read them, is their plain, commonsense approach, not making any of the usual assumptions about culture and other mystification, but looking at what actually happens, and why.

Our treatment of our children is abominable. Great crimes are committed in the name of discipline - serving only to inculcate in the victims a mindless rage which is only temporarily slaked by anti-social behaviour. Yes, the researchers do measure rage, and like every other factor they attempt to quantify its effects. I believe that they are mostly successful.

Every now and then there is an opening in the Jamaican psyche which begs for the inauguration of a real public discussion about our real values and attitudes, and about why these values and those attitudes are not critically examined to see how much damage some may do or how others may be able to help us move forward.

One thing I can say is that if our streets are to run with blood, let it be metaphorical blood from the herds of sacred cows we need to slaughter rather than that of our children who, right now, are being cannibalised by their elders.

The Long Good-Bye

2005-04-03T00:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

I got myself into a great deal of hot water 40 years ago when I wrote an editorial entitled "Who will tell the Old Man to Go?" Jamaica's first officially styled prime minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante, was, unfortunately, in his dotage when he became prime minister after the elections of 1962.

He could still crack the odd joke, but it was clear to anyone who knew him and to many who didn't, that he was past his prime. But then it was considered sacrilege to criticise the PM.

I was accused of being rude, offensive and a host of other unkind things. There was even a parliamentary debate about the paper I edited - Public Opinion - and about me. Neither The Gleaner nor the Press Association could see any reasonable objection to the Government's shutting me up by shutting us down, nor could the Inter-American Press Association, that bastion of 'Press Freedom'.

I recount this just to suggest my evenhandedness in these matters - in further consideration of which I submit the fact that I watched my paper being torn to bits by Norman Manley in front of a PNP NEC meeting in Mandeville and by the Hon Edwin Allen, minister of education, in Parliament a few weeks later. Great fun.

It was easy to criticise Bustamante, now a national hero, because most people knew that he was just along for the ride and that the real prime minister was Donald Sangster. Bustamante derided Norman Manley's refurbishing of Vale Royal as the Prime Ministerial residence; it was much more suitable, he said, for a maternity home.

So, at great expense he built Jamaica House, but refused to live there; just before he was due to occupy it, the place was struck by lightning, and a week or so later, when he was at the Caymanas Park races, the grandstand there was also struck by lightning. It was a 'Sign', some said.

Since Bustamante's retirement, only two prime ministers have spent any time in Jamaica House - Hugh Shearer and Michael Manley. I am not sure how long Shearer remained there, but Manley couldn't stand the place and moved to a (much smaller) protocol house. Sangster lived at Vale Royal, as did Seaga and Patterson. It seems that Norman Manley had the right idea all along.

Norman Manley's more important ideas have stood up in the nearly 40 years since he died, and the nearly 50 years since he ceased to be Jamaica's first and only Premier.

His emphasis on development was aimed not at concrete, but at people. Gordon House, the place where Parliament meets, expresses his thought perfectly. Gordon House has always been inadequate, and Manley knew it when he built it. He also knew that Jamaica could not afford the kind of Parliament building most people wanted, nor could we afford Jamaica House, which cost twice as much as a really grand Parliament building would have.

You will not be surprised to learn that Jamaica developed faster and more solidly under Norman Manley's guidance than it had before or has since. During his seven-year stewardship, agriculture accelerated to new rates of productivity, because of measures such as the Facilities for Titles Act and the various measures to give farmers access to cheap finance and stable markets.

In seven years, Manley changed the face of Jamaica. His free education initiative, which he admitted was even then inadequate, is still the basis for the Jamaican education system half-a-century and a million more people later.

He renegotiated the bauxite agreements and put the new money into capital development projects, especially in education; and he built most of the institutions which now bear the infrastructure of Jamaica: the Bank of Jamaica, the Planning Institute, Cabinet government; the social development agencies, the government's information services, the Army, the tourist industry, environmental law, and, of course, the now defunct JBC, killed by Messrs Seaga and Patterson.

While Manley was a socialist, he never made it an issue. As David Coore, speaking on his behalf at the time said: "Socialism is a label." In this he was much better advised than his son, Michael, whose rhetoric provoked a violent response from the Jamaica Labour Party, which recognised that if Manley were allowed to succeed, that would be the end of the JLP.

Today, half-a-century after Norman Manley came to office, another PNP prime minister has been announcing that he will, in the course of time, be demitting office.

This prime minister has said that Norman Manley was his mentor. N W certainly gave him preferment, seeing in him a talented young Jamaican who he thought had what it took to lead this country.

In my opinion, that was one of Manley's few mistakes. I cannot imagine Manley, about to demit office, admonishing the country to take up tasks which he ought to have taken up years before. I cannot imagine Manley leaving behind him a party so disorganised, so disunited and so undistinguished in leadership. Manley, unlike P J Patterson, was not afraid of bright people. He surrounded himself with them and there was not a yes-man in the lot.

Since then, the PNP has managed to go down to defeat in St Ann, where Ivan Lloyd won the first seat ever by a political party in the history of modern Jamaica. Not even Lloyd himself could win his own seat (for his son) for the JLP when he changed sides. That P J Patterson has managed to do so is no ordinary achievement.

The present PM has insulated himself behind a phalanx of advisers, consultants and plain yes-men to the extent that he himself is hardly visible. His admirers, like Maxine Henry-Wilson, extol his unobtrusiveness, his refusal to be "in your face".

This trait may be appreciated by the businessmen and other beneficiaries of the Government's version of development. It appears to be less and less effective among the great mass of those who Mr Patterson's immediate predecessor called "the sufferers".

Unfortunately for Mr Patterson and the rest of us, there are a great many more 'sufferers' than ever before. As the gap between the classes increases and the social services disappear, and as the Government takes itself out of the faces of the public, there is an increasing public sentiment that the Jamaican ship of state is not just rudderless, it has also lost its propellers - its screws, as sailors call them.

Among the middle classes there is a general air of 'wha'-fe-do?' A sense of purposeless bemused drifting while the background noises get louder and more alarming. So when Mr Patterson advises us to have 'vision' and to 'organise', these seeds of wisdom fall now on ground overgrown by weeds where once the soil was merely fallow.

When his admirers point to his memorials, the Doomsday Highway, the Cartade assault on Long Mountain, most people are noticeably underwhelmed, especially those who watch the progress of the petroleum price index.

Mr Patterson is not in anybody's face, though he has all the justification to be, for instance, as a leader in the Third World, a fighter against the brutal intimacies of the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation. In our neighbourhood - the Caribbean - he has failed even to make a gesture of protection toward the Haitian people, and instead has reverted to his bad habits of 1994 when he sold out the refugees to the Americans in their floating slave barracoons. He is planning to deport nearly half of the refugees now here, effectively sending them back to their murderers and persecutors.

One would imagine that in the fight for survival, Jamaica would be at least in the front row, having occupied an honourable place there since 1958 when Norman Manley banned trade with South Africa in a hugely symbolic gesture against Apartheid.

Our relatively privileged position obliges us to defend those less able than we are and to succour the suffering. Neither internationally nor domestically has our prime minister made a single gesture in those directions.

Ten years ago when the university published its study of crime and violence in the urban slums, many of us believed that such a government as that promised by the PNP would move (as had Norman Manley before he even entered politics) to work for the development of the people, to work for peace, harmony, the reconciliation of families and the raising up of communities. They Cry Respect - the 1995 UWI publication - was a blueprint for what could at least have been attempted.

I am sorry to bore you with a nine-year-old quotation, but I am compelled to remind people of where we were then:
'What the people want above all, the people want peace. They are brutalised, terrorised, victimised and separated from the rest of us by what they call "The War".

They are orphaned and left childless by the war. Although the conditions for the war were set by politicians, they no longer control the parameters of the conflict. The people want an end to the war, an end to the guns and the 'donmanship.'

".Nutten naw gwaan inna de ghetto" because of the ghetto stigma which disrupts schools, destroys the possibility of work, tears apart families, kills men, women, children and babies.

"The people want some sort of mediation process to begin, involving the community institutions, the clubs, the church, the police and even the politicians. The people want the 'bad guys' removed from the area to be counselled, perhaps subjected to semi-military discipline, re-trained."

That was in May 1996. Now, when Mr Patterson talks about 'vision' and all the other virtues we need to display, I ask myself where, but WHERE, was Mr Patterson in 1996? At that time he was saying what Dr Phillips, his preferred successor, is saying now. Mr Patterson was instructing the police to use 'the full force of the law' to curb violence.

I will conclude with another quotation from a decade ago: "Peace is not simply an absence of war, it is a comprehensive programme engendering a unity of purpose and co-operative endeavour among all the people. It requires that we recognise a common interest in the welfare of all, that none of us can live content - or safe - if there is one of us in misery, terror or economic servitude.

We can neither be half free nor half rich. The wealthiest among us is as vulnerable to the unreason of the gun as is any handicapped infant vulnerable to abuse." Unfortunately, all the pretenders to Mr Patterson's throne, with the exception of Portia Simpson Miller, are cut from the same cloth as Patterson.

To a man, they seem to believe that people can eat statistics.

A Stone for the Disinherited

2005-03-27T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

If Terri Schiavo is lucky, she will at last be allowed to die in peace and with dignity. Mrs Schiavo has not been among those present for the last 15 years, despite the efforts of her husband and her family to bring her back from a condition barely distinguishable from death.
The husband accepted the inevitable some years ago, her parents have not.

The world is now aware of the issues and principles at stake in the dispute, and an overwhelming majority of the American people agree with her husband that it is a travesty to try to keep her 'alive'.

It is an ironic fact that the people of the US have been better informed about the legal and medical details of this contentious dispute than they ever were two years ago about the legal and military details of the impending war against Iraq.

Pressure from the rabid, religious right - the three Rs of American politics - ensured that the Press devoted enormous amounts of time and resources to the Schiavo case with the result that there can hardly be anyone in the US - or anywhere else on the planet with access to television - who does not know the details.

The most trenchant commentary on the case, in my view, came from Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, who said crisply, "As the Bush White House desperately manoeuvres in Iraq to prevent the new government from being run according to the dictates of religious fundamentalists, it desperately manoeuvres here to pander to religious fundamentalists who want to dictate how the Government should be run".

Michael Schiavo (left), husband of Terri Schiavo, answers question during a news conference following oral arguments in the Florida Supreme Court case in this August 31, 2004 file photo, in Tallahassee, Florida. With Schiavo are his brother Bryan (centre), and his attorney George Felos. Schiavo insists that his wife told him she would never want to be kept alive artificially. For seven years he has fought her parents to carry out what he says would be her wish. (Photo: AP)

In the process, President Bush and his brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, have demonstrated a cold-hearted hypocrisy which would be difficult to rival.

Despite their so-called principles, their enthusiasm for the campaign to "err on the side of life" evaporated at about the same time the polls disclosed that President Bush's approval ratings had fallen precipitously and were lower than they had ever before been in his presidency.

Having displayed their contempt for the US Constitution and for the 'States Rights' they and their right-wing brethren affect to defend, they backed off as soon as it became obvious that their act was not playing well in Peoria or anywhere else.

President Bush did not 'err on the side of life' when he consigned the born-again, fully conscious Karla Fay Tucker to lethal injection, although Jeb Bush wails about giving Terri Schiavo the same rights as any convicted murderer on death row. Imbeciles and innocents were all grist to Mr Bush's Texan mill, which consumed more human life than any other single legal jurisdiction on earth.

And Mr Bush was the gentleman who signed into law, an act which allowed Texas health care providers to pull the plugs of patients on life support if their guardians couldn't afford to pay - whatever their prospects for survival.

Politicians are rarely an exemplary breed, but in this case they have provided examples of mendacity, hypocrisy and cowardice, which will take ages to surpass.

Zapping the Disinherited

Last week, in the US state of Minnesota, on a Native American reservation, a high school student armed himself with several firearms and, having murdered his grandfather and his grandfather's female partner, proceeded to kill several of his fellow students as well as a teacher and a security guard.

It was reported that he had been a disturbed youth, being treated with Prozac - like the 15-year-old tried as an adult and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment a couple of weeks ago for murdering his grandfather and grandmother when he was 13.

As in earlier, similar cases, the diagnosis was that the boy killers were loners, frustrated, bullied or teased, without any real sense of their own importance. They lashed out, perhaps under the influence of their prescribed medication or under the influence of the Internet or something. Nobody, it seems, took them seriously.

Another news item, this time from California, reported that nearly half of all blacks and Hispanics - mainly boys - drop out of high school instead of graduating. And there are more young black men in prison in the US than are in college in that country.

In Jamaica, entire generations of boys and young men are in similar predicaments and they react in similar ways. They are cosily described as marginalised males, and for most people, that is the end of it.

Almost exactly 40 years ago, Douglas Manley, brother of Michael Manley and son of Norman Manley, did notice what was happening to young men in Jamaica. In an article entitled - if my memory serves - "Mental ability in Jamaican children", Manley described the beginning of the marginalisation process.

Bustamante was then prime minister. He despised teachers - he considered them all members of the Opposition PNP. As far as he was concerned, they would have to wait for decent wages. They are still waiting.

As Douglas Manley saw it, the effect on the male youth of Jamaica was disastrous. Because male teachers had fled the classroom to sell life insurance, or into the police force, young boys in school generally lacked male role models.

They lacked male role models at home as well, because the economics of Jamaica meant that men had to migrate all over the country and even abroad, looking for work. This syndrome was best described by Edith Clarke in her book, My Mother who Fathered Me. Clarke ascribed much of the weakness of Jamaican family structure to this need to migrate, and also, if I read her right, to traditional practices and customs inherited from slavery.

In a society in which male Jamaicans are no more literate today than they were 95 years ago (about 30 per cent), it should be easy to understand why in the age of the cellphone, many Jamaican men still believe that mosquitoes can carry the HIV/AIDS virus. And why they still treat family life as a sometime thing - even when they do not migrate.

In addition to the absence of fathers and male teachers, young boys, because of economic pressure, are prematurely dragged out of school and into the labour force to help their families survive.

Douglas Manley predicted four decades ago that in 20 to 30 years Jamaican women would be considerably better educated than their men, and would have great difficulty finding mates of equivalent educational and social status. Those years have come and gone and Douglas Manley has proved correct.

The University of the West Indies has had to implement what is effectively an affirmative action programme for men in order to try to come near to a balance of the sexes on the campuses.

Because men are so scarce in these upper reaches of the society, their behaviour towards women is casual and often, brutally dismissive. For many young, educated Jamaican men, there is "always another gal" - always another epithet to disparage women, always the sense of an unearned self-importance.

A kind of Jamaican droit de seigneur

In the working-class Jamaican man these attitudes are perfectly expressed by the dancehall artistes whose sadistic lyrics are lapped up by their audiences of both sexes, making the best of their fates - as they imagine. And if those fates include HIV, well.

In a society in which the plantation system still rules, no government has considered that cities exercise their magnetic attraction because there is nothing to do in the rural areas but to gaze on the acres of hunger symbolised by the rolling expanses of idle land.

When slavery was abolished it was the landowners who were compensated for the loss of their capital equipment - the slaves. The slaves were induced, constrained, bribed, beaten and victimised by the laws of the land to go back to the sugar estates, and when even those harsh measures had little effect, the British brought in coolies from China and India to take over from the Africans.

It didn't work, but added a new level of oppression and exclusion. Blacks could not get the loans or the credit to start enterprises, even shops, and had to wait until N W Manley's Facilities for Titles law in 1955 to be able to embark on the business of 'making themselves men'.

Since Independence, the land has been transformed from a productive asset into a portfolio asset. The 'ghettoes' are overcrowded. The schools are primitive, lacking separation between classes which are taught by rote - Class One attempting to be heard over the racket of Class Two.

Because there are so few decent schools, the competition for places is intense. The boys, traumatised by the absence of fathers or father figures, have to be drafted like mules, to learn. (Lest anyone question the value of male teachers, consider this: to whom does a pubertal boy turn when he gets his first 'wet dream'? To his mother? To some unknown woman teacher?) Even the Boy Scouts are now, I understand, mostly led by women.

Because there are so few decent schools and so few places, the boys, distracted by testosterone, are almost always lagging behind. At the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication where I teach part-time, the ratio of men to women is, as in most of the rest of the university, about 30:70 and this is because as I said, the university tries to achieve some sort of balance of the sexes. Without that, it would be more likely four to one - 20:80.

Thirty years ago, Dr Lloyd Barnett's commission of inquiry into conditions at the country's prisons discovered that on Death Row the number of people with extremely high Intelligence Quotients was much higher than in the population at large.

The obvious question is why should some of the smartest boys in the country end up being condemned to death for murder. Since I am no sociologist, my answer is the answer of a layman: it is that the weight of traditional slave society culture, the absence of literacy and the economic disfranchisement combine to drive the brainiest among the poor into crime. They are too proud to beg, too spirited to go gently into any good night while about them and above them are so many examples of grossly unearned increment.

In a society in which they are outsiders from birth, they may make temporary peace with the oppressive system, but they are always at war with it.

Some of them, of course, are more 'fortunate' than others and learn trades which do not require them to read or write. There may be an Einstein, a Pushkin or a Colin Powell at this moment, chopping cane in a canepiece somewhere. There may be a Ray Charles, a George Washington Carver or a Nelson Mandela disassembling and reassembling a machine pistol somewhere else.

So when the prime minister decides to pacify the 'volatile areas' by increasing the number of police and soldiers, the dispatching of community development workers should be more than an afterthought.

Much, much, more.