recounting the tale

 

this is the deed that falls out of my hand

your heart is open now to all our care

a touch of autumn comes upon the air

there is so little that we could demand

we look at nature and think it all grand

but know that not a thing is ever fair

that simple action is more than we dare

and each of us is forced to take a stand

my thought is open to whatever makes

sense in the morning when we first arise

to see the world fullest impure glory

not caring about all the shocks and aches

that keep us from the truest golden prize

or so we seem to tell that final story

inside the meme

 

we lack a sense of truly human mode

voices are raised when silence ought to reign

there is no way for us to read the code

 

each wants to reap what other folk have sowed

without a pause for any to explain

we lack a sense of truly human mode

 

no one waits here at the most urgent node

the place where all the symbols stand out plain

there is no way for us to read the code

 

we’ve come too far along this narrow road

to discount all the moments of small gain

we lack a sense of truly human mode

 

it’s far too easy to let time erode

the certainties for which you should campaign

there is no way for us to read the code

 

a grain of powder would make things explode

and halt at once the long-prevailing pain

we lack a sense of truly human mode

there is no way for us to read the code

so we are evaluated

it does not matter all the good we do
we are still painted in the tints of rage
since we are seen as creatures in the zoo

someone may think the present time is new
and praise the noble tenor of the age
it does not matter all the good we do

will vanish quickly into background view
and other matters will the world engage
since we are seen as creatures in the zoo

those who their oldest platitudes still spew
may think them things of beauty on the page
it does not matter all the good we do

will move no hearts there will be very few
who’ll think to break the bars upon our cage
since we are seen as creatures in the zoo

now all the glory goes to the rough crew
who have learned how to prance upon the stage
it does not matter all the good we do
since we are seen as creatures in the zoo

returning magic

there is a secret that no one is told
since when you learn it you have cause to groan
for your whole sense of right is overthrown
and what was warm and safe has turned quite cold
there’s now no surety that you can hold
and all your blood has become solid stone
icily pure you face the world alone
in that one instant you have joined the old
now that the universe is once more wild
with all the passions that you have repressed
out of your need to be part of the herd
perhaps you can see once more like a child
capture again the honest decent zest
and find true meaning in each human word

a halo round the moon

 

 there is a circle around the full moon

a thing of wonder in the warmth of night

an awful omen something not quite right

and then the rain brings life back into tune

this brilliance breaks me out of my cocoon

but chases me indoors i can’t requite

the gift of thought and of the fragile light

but do not understand it is a boon

to be caught there that moment by the rain

in natural blessing just that simple touch

of cooling water taking back to earth

both mind and body it is clear and plain

we must not love the world so very much

as to forget just what the light is worth

the politics of autumn

so much of what we learn is simply wrong
dishonest preaching to a stupid choir
we’re just supposed to hide within the throng

true honest effort takes too bloody long
for hard folk driven by the voice of ire
so much of what we learn is simply wrong

to kill our foes will serve to make us strong
and decency is nothing to admire
we’re just supposed to hide within the throng

the safest thing is just to go along
stay silent above all do not inquire
so much of what we learn is simply wrong

we let the foolish beat upon the gong
and hope that we can make it back entire
we’re just supposed to hide within the throng

all must participate in the old song
and give heed to the words of the keen liar
so much of what we learn is simply wrong
we’re just supposed to hide within the throng

eternal i endure

 

so we discover that we have found hell

right in this place beneath the smiling eyes

it seems so normal calm and lacking smell

 

you tell us not to cry out nor to yell

nor in our shock to indicate surprise

so we discover that we have found hell

 

there is not much that anyone could tell

you’d have to be right there to hear the cries

it seems so normal calm and lacking smell

 

all that we have is the remaining shell

of who we were something you would despise

so we discover that we have found hell

 

right where we thought and we could not rebel

against our very selves in our own guise

it seems so normal calm and lacking smell

 

there was no signal no last warning bell

we got there on the road of simple lies

so we discover that we have found hell

it seems so normal calm and lacking smell

morning on the ridge

what holds us up is nothing but light air
your thought is like it vanishingly weak
yet we have reached another lofty peak
and see the lowland down below us clear
as on a map since this morning is fair
the sun behind us showing what we seek
for this short moment we have the mystique
you cannot stop us doing what we dare
so this is who we are and what we need
past all the shadows that have obscured sight
secrets revealed as we announce the name
in open daylight time to set the seed
into clean earth long hours before the night
and fill each heart with joy as with a flame

lookout

so there is water out there south and west
that’s all we see and out beyond more land
and stranger places on each palm-fringed strand
will seem like us the modern dispossessed
who don’t belong but have got the bequest
of gold and green passed down from hand to hand
so that each has to make some sort of stand
or claim that they’ve been given a great test
these are the lies that little children tell
when parents think that they are fast asleep
to scare each other by pretending brave
the ones that later turn to the hard sell
making the painful seem ungodly cheap
while the blue water waits to be our grave

meditation on the hither shore

 

so much is silenced by the hungry sea

forgotten centuries that weren’t all grief

the glimmer of the waves is no relief

not urgent voices bidding us let be

ignore the past be humble bend the knee

to those far wiser suspend all mischief

and turn the raging mind back to belief

in angry gods of the smooth bourgeoisie

now we’re the ones who always must atone

not for our sins but for your fathers’ lies

making great efforts in these brighter days

not to disturb the ancient broken bone

nor to take hold of the bright golden prize

but leave to you the honour and the praise

this we have found

 

so we forget just who and what we were

in this large kingdom where the vulture reigns

honour and history have to concur

 

in some decision about what’s to stir

both hearts and visions in those swift campaigns

so we forget just who and what we were

 

the happy cat will nestle here and purr

ignoring us while we don yet more chains

honour and history have to concur

 

with what we say as time moves in a blur

of rapid actions over sad remains

so we forget just who and what we were

in these bold days the wise entrepreneur

knows well just what good matter he retains

honour and history have to concur

 

just as the bone is kicked towards the cur

the one that any better thing disdains

so we forget just who and what we were

honour and history have to concur

Singer-Man

 

John Maxwell

 

Crackle! pop! snap!

I’m not talking about cereal. That would be snap, crackle, pop. Everybody knows that.

Crackle! pop! Snap!

Watching John McCain in action reminds me of Tom Paxton’s sixties song about the marvelous toy that

“…went “Zip” when it moved,

And “Pop” when it stopped,

And, “Whirrr” when it stood still.

I never knew just what it was

And I guess I never will.

Coupling McCain with Alaska’s toxic termagant presents a fairly terrifying vision for the rest of the world. It’s a far way from John Kennedy’s promise four decades ago that the US would be a friend of  people seeking freedom, a friend to the poor and weak. McCain and Palin present a fundamentalist and revanchist face to the world, promising an even rougher ride than George Bush as the Haitians are already aware.

As I said eight years ago, when the United States elects a president they are also electing a kind of chief spokesman for much of a world with aspirations light years away from the parochial vision of civilisation imagined by Bush, Cheney, McCain and Palin. For the rest of us, the US president we hope will be a singer-man for the world, one who embodies, expresses and guarantees the deepest aspirations of people for liberty and dignity. That it is why an English worldwide poll has found that the world wants Obama to win. The preference is almost 100% across countries as disparate as Norway and Saudi Arabia.

Almost all the public opinion surveys conducted in the US over the past few weeks show the Republican ticket steadily losing ground to the Democrats, Obama and Biden. One website is devoted entirely to analysing electoral polling by all the reputable pollsters. (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/) According to them, the odds on Obama being the next president were better than  90% as of this last week, and their projection was that he would win nearly 350 electoral votes with at least  52% of the popular vote

In elections for the Senate the projection was that the democrats would win at least 56 seats – not filibuster proof but close, with the probability of an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives.

Major reasons for these perceptions are the toxic unpopularity of President George Bush whose approval rating is now below Nixon’s just prior to his resignation, the feeling that the US is on the wrong track (more than 80%)   and the catastrophic declines in employment, living standards and economic security.

Adele Polk, a 90 year old woman in Akron, Ohio, shot herself twice in the chest when sheriff’s deputies came to evict her from the house she and her late husband had called home for decades. Mrs Polk’s mortgage has now been forgiven while she is being treated in hospital and is expected to recover.

The bankers and financiers are now among the best hated people in the United States. One sign displayed on Wall Street a few days ago  exhorted the occupants of the office blocks to “JUMP YOU F**KERS” .

Popular opinion is turning savagely against the people FDR called “Malefactors of great wealth”  – the saboteurs of the American dream, con-men whose Ponzi schemes hollowed out the productive centre of American capitalism until the very people they  had defrauded were being asked to come to their rescue, because they were “too big to be allowed to fail” and no one but the taxpayer had the resources to save them. The bailout means the US taxpayer will end up owning huge segments of the financial industry. Will they want to give it back?

 In Illinois’ Cook County -  effectively, Chicago -  the elected Sheriff has decided that his officers will no longer carry out evictions unless he is guaranteed by the mortgage companies that the people he evicts actually owe money on the houses they inhabit. Sheriff Thomas Dart says his officers have been evicting tenants from rented houses, people who have paid their rents to owners who have defaulted. He doesn’t think that’s fair.

All over the US resentment is rising against the injustice of it all, while the Republicans are intent on blaming the victims for the mortgage meltdown. According to the GOP orthodoxy, it was the Democrats in Congress and the federally backed mortgage wholesalers who were responsible along with the poor people who borrowed to buy houses they couldn’t afford.

What really happened is that the Democrats did exert pressure on mortgage companies to lend to minorities and others traditionally segregated outside the mortgage market. The companies responded by inventing mortgages which seemed affordable, but which rapidly morphed  out of the reach of working class and middle class  borrowers who had not read the fine print on their contracts. It was a scam and a highly profitable one which might have worked longer  had it not been so all pervasive that it collapsed of its own over-reach. It extracted billions in savings from the poorest layer of Americans and financed the ability of the scammers to speculate on the basis of ‘securities’  with values notional at best and fictitious at worst.

As in all Ponzi schemes, the crunch had to come when the scam ran out of ‘greater fools’. While the black and Hispanic communities knew they were in trouble two and three years ago, their predators remained blissfully unaware, wheeling and dealing as if there would never be a reckoning.

Now, even John McCain realises that no matter how much he and his cohorts have blamed the working class borrowers, it is important to help them out of trouble. This is one more flip-flop of McCain, who has been boasting about his reformist record, even while his real history is of a serial deregulator, a rule smasher, whose fondest ideals have been for freeing up everything in the interest of the unrestricted market -a man who never met a rule he approved of.

Now, faced with the increasing disapproval of the US electorate it doesn’t seem that even the best efforts of Republican bureaucrats will be able to sabotage the election to the extent where it can be stolen as were the last two.  The disapproval is too wide, too deep. Today, polls show Obama preferred as being a better likely leader, a more compassionate leader and a more able president. McCain is still preferred as a warrior who could prosecute the Iraq war, but since most Americans don’t want to be in Iraq that advantage is nothing compared to the feeling that Obama can best get Americans out of their economic troubles.

cast the die

 

what’s missing is a sense of what is just

our vision is not shaped only by art

we have to live and so we have to trust

 

words have true power to freeze and combust

but action has received the greater part

what’s missing is a sense of what is just

 

you do not see us as strong or robust

only as weak and ready to depart

we have to live and so we have to trust

 

in what we have as more than just a crust

over the pain inflicted by each dart

what’s missing is a sense of what is just

 

we have to matter and be more than dust

stirred up by every trader in the mart

we have to live and so we have to trust

 

that what we are will raise more than disgust

but will inspire some joy in pain-filled heart

what’s missing is a sense of what is just

we have to live and so we have to trust

e:EX’a
Rr books must go into the fire

 

our presence here shall soon have never been

that is the goal at which we must conspire

our signal glory is to be denier

of that which honest folk might all believe

remove those things so no one can retrieve

and once we’ve finished simply close the door

those who thought otherwise are just naïve

yet when when we started we all knew the score

 

prince there’s so much that you will not achieve

because our target you just can’t perceive

so many good materials we abhor

since all we do is shatter and bereave

yet when we started we all knew the score

a lower form of knowledge

no one who listens notices the word
spoken by those who have forgotten speech
so further action seems yet more absurd

no greater title ever was conferred
yet now it seems so far beyond our reach
no one who listens notices the word

not even one whose choices were deterred
by sudden silence which enforced a breach
so further action seems yet more absurd

now these were matters of which we had heard
before we started well within our reach
no one who listens notices the word

that has been uttered by those who preferred
action to thought and who just had to preach
so further action seems yet more absurd

but we unbroken still see things unblurred
and have learned lessons that you did not teach
no one who listens notices the word
so further action seems yet more absurd

passion and desire

 

where passion and desire blend into sense

of who each is and how each came to be

not just alone but cast out on that sea

where navigation is without pretense

of other purpose where the smooth immense

circle of waters is the referee

and gives hard answer to each hopeful plea

since when it strikes there can be no defence

those who now smile have not the least good thought

in what might pass to others for a mind

to let you know the harshness of this scrape

nor in what trammels you might soon be caught

since they prefer that you advance so blind

as to be swiftly where you can’t escape

a sort of wager

 

this is the place where odd and even meet

in point of fact there is a choice of gloom

in how and when the fire will best consume

 

each one of those who dares not to retreat

before the voice that speaks of death and doom

this is the place where odd and even meet

 

another sort of messenger might greet

any who comes to open up the tomb

to sweep it out with an old-fashioned broom

this is the place where odd and even meet

with reason and with nature too

 

our task is to destroy the trade of kings

looking past mountains to the open plain

we reach the place we seek on outspread wings

 

of little value are the golden things

piled high upon the smiling traitor’s wain

our task is to destroy the trade of kings

 

the freshest water from the coolest springs

must serve to cool each brow and cleanse the stain

we reach the place we seek on outspread wings

 

no one expects to bear each of the swings

from past to future but we can’t abstain

our task is to destroy the trade of kings

 

and so we must withstand the constant stings

of noisy insects and ignore the pain

we reach the place we seek on outspread wings

 

you can’t ignore the loudest bell that rings

fervent with joy at the returning rain

our task is to destroy the trade of kings

we reach the place we seek on outspread wings

in the realm of the dog

 

some meaning must inhere in what’s not said

by any of the folk who claim our time

with words as filled with music as with slime

and promises to scare off all the dread

that’s come upon us now the wiser head

knows what is common and what things are prime

those measures suited for a harsher clime

like ours now that the heroes are all dead

so that we listen all the claimants shout

enough to shake the earth and raise up high

those who have passed beneath the heavy soil

but none of us knows what it’s all about

or can discern small truth from the big lie

without expenditure of too much toil

now down below

 

if you have measured breath in weight of gold

no one has spoken of the need for haste

nor of the reasons why the flock were chased

out of safe shelter back into the cold

such a short time ago now just enrolled

in this man’s army and out on the waste

not one of us but knows we are disgraced

by this sad service and now you are told

say this when time returns you to your place

in the long record of the failing years

that we have done our task and gone our way

said our defiant words right to your face

cast off our clothes and let loose our tears

but never once have we refused our pay

autumn lives

 

we break the shadow and bring out the sun

winter is coming but we know its end

this is a battle that has once been won

 

each tempest must in turn finish its run

some idiot will claim there is a trend

we break the shadow and bring out the sun

 

you can’t be sure of truth before it’s done

but know that even hardest steel must bend

this is a battle that has once been won

 

the word has force that will break down the gun

and nothing has your back  except a friend

we break the shadow and bring out the sun

 

the principle must be that it’s begun

with happy heart that good things should intend

this is a battle that has once been won

 

truth is that each of us is having fun

knowing that there are things that we transcend

we break the shadow and bring out the sun

this is a battle that has once been won

listening harder

 

this is the meaning of the open gem

word after word and not a one of praise

much will depend on what is on the stem

 

these are the matters that we would condemn

without more thought minds all within a haze

this is the meaning of the open gem

 

all has been marked and made neat on the hem

we don’t expect a change in this new phase

much will depend on what is on the stem

 

still you will be expected to show phlegm

not be the one on whom others will gaze

this is the meaning of the open gem

 

we might expect in this case to contemn

but not to execute nor to amaze

much will depend on what is on the stem

 

you do not think that you are one of them

of those who can’t be counted on these days

this is the meaning of the open gem

much will depend on what is on the stem

in the swamps

 

across the solitudes a single moan

passes and we are locked into the plight

of one far distant who is not alone

although that pain is hidden from our sight

nothing is done by you in our despite

at invocation we will light the blaze

we see again the colder harder days

 

you know the value of a simple stone

and how to make it shed a little light

that will convert to something hardly known

to those who claim to be straight and forthright

our task is not to hasten nor excite

but to take you most swiftly through the maze

we see again the colder harder days

 

we know the colour of the human bone

and how to polish it and turn it bright

as instrument to punish and atone

plain cure for darkness and the coming blight

this product of the sacrificial height

must be exposed unto the divine gaze

we see again the colder harder days

 

hopes and desires are wholly overblown

what is to come will never give us right

nor any justice since the truth is flown

out of the window into the cold night

and what is left is not for our delight

no one would want to give us love or praise

we see again the colder harder days

ballade of regulation

 

all of our efforts fall into the shade

drastic the choice but not without its crumb

of gentle hope to keep hearts unafraid

a chance of passion that would allow some

to build new life where others would be glum

or hang their hopes upon a rusty nail

for you to laugh or others to assail

those facts of business that prove not so tame

but can stand up when others simply fail

these are the rules and we must play the game

 

time with its tricks our patience must abrade

or beat a rhythm on a noisy drum

such are the practices of normal trade

when all of human life is a small sum

and nothing much splits millionaire from bum

we are blown off our course by the swift gale

and can’t expect to make an easy sale

since all we get is insult and foul blame

it’s tasks like these that make the toughest quail

these are the rules and we must play the game

 

others might seek to hide or to evade

the pains and penances that have to come

in rapid series and in swift cascade

we cannot keep these things beneath the thumb

nothing is left and we have been struck dumb

preventing the recounting of detail

all  honest words are cast outside the pale

and truth becomes a matter of ill fame

against the facts there is none who would rail

these are the rules and we must play the game

 

prince you receive no message through the mail

and find the secrets have turned very stale

there’s no one left who can ignite the flame

but many where who hard fate could bewail

these are the rules and we must play the game

beside the limestone road

 

an old marl-hole where rat-bats congregate

bears quiet witness to each hidden sin

not just to what we could not dare to win

by dint of effort and so blame on fate

this is no church for you to desecrate

but a dark place where many lives begin

and those who know will just conceal a grin

for nouns not verbs would seem to conjugate

that was the story when the night turned cold

under a sky as dark as any soul

when all the blame was placed on certain wiles

but others said the cause was merely gold

unwisdom aiming at a pretty goal

that journey will not end for many miles

peaks that scrape the sky

 

to fear the mountains that you have not seen

strikes me as beyond odd as plain bizarre

there is no horror that could strike so far

nor any danger that might come between

that place and this you need to find the mean

of calm and order not to let things mar

the proper temper so that at the bar

to make all sober we might intervene

each new adventure has a painful price

in time and effort and we can’t recall

the life so spent back to a happy place

but you don’t ever want to hear advice

and are too eager to run out and fall

and then return with fresh tears on your face

one leaden rule

 

the world is much more complex than you think

tricks that you learn when young turn out to fail

this weight of truth would drive a saint to drink

 

you’ve forged a chain of good things link by link

and then find out it’s all to no avail

the world is much more complex than you think

 

your happy moment passes in a blink

it vanishes the second you exhale

this weight of truth would drive a saint to drink

 

cold winds will find the one uncovered chink

and force their way in just to make you ail

the world is much more complex than you think

 

so you work hard and idlers get the mink

with all the jewels that are out on sale

this weight of truth would drive a saint to drink

 

no one at all must be allowed to think

since their good effort will end up quite stale

the world is much more complex than you think

this weight of truth would drive a saint to drink

at home the green remains

 

so many trees in full and golden leaf

this changing season as the days turn cold

birds have gone south and fools have become bold

 

nights grow too long and sunlight is too brief

you know the story it is often told

so many trees in full and golden leaf

 

now swiftly falling for time’s a hard thief

and eager hoarding the  fast-passing gold

leaves us behind nothing that we can hold

so many trees in full and golden leaf

long waiting

 

at this dark curve of the long mountain road

the signpost tells us just where we must go

those little places we are meant to know

but do not speak of method nor of mode

the yellow finger is a sort of goad

to warn us that our pace is yet too slow

our feet must hasten so we catch the glow

and make most certain that our goods are stowed

not here but soon a true signal will come

to clarify just who must keep the score

and who depart and lose the chance at fame

so much depends on true tone of the drum

not how or where each of us comes ashore

but only that we must accept the blame

distant lightning

 

an echo of the past resolves to pain

no matter what we do none can escape

all stand bedraggled in the autumn rain

 

who thought to win was first to fall off wain

the furthest off from the finishing tape

an echo of the past resolves to pain

 

it takes no wisdom to note the hard strain

of those who holding matters in firm shape

all stand bedraggled in the autumn rain

 

not daring to look up nor to complain

while foolish mouths are all of them agape

an echo of the past resolves to pain

 

some facts are set out very clear and plain

as both bright angel and dull foolish ape

all stand bedraggled in the autumn rain

 

we must lament the loss of normal brain

which must explain how we are in this scrape

an echo of the past resolves to pain

all stand bedraggled in the autumn rain

under the same stars

 

this permitted we have grace to caper

from dusk to dawn as the leaves redly fall

marking the season with a noble ball

each bright dancer bearing amber taper

notes now shining on the golden paper

make our demands seem piteously small

as watchers wonder why we had the gall

to think our hottest wishes more than vapour

now time must move in tandem with the sun

our hearts obey an older slower law

while in their nests the summer birds still wait

far to the south where warmth is never done

but nature rules with equally harsh claw

a younger person wonders at his fate

Racism and Poverty

 

 

John Maxwell

 

The people of Haiti are as poor as human beings can be.

According to the statisticians of the World Bank and others who speculate about how many Anglos can dance on the head of a peon, Haiti may either be the second, third or fourth poorest country in the world.

In Haiti’s case, statistics are irrelevant.

 When large numbers of people are reduced to eating dirt – earth, clay – it is impossible to imagine poverty any more absolute, any more desperate, any more inhuman and degrading.

The chairman of the World Bank visited Haiti this past week. This man, Robert Zoellick, is an expert finance-capitalist, a former partner in the investment bankers Goldman Sachs, whose 22,000 ‘traders” last year averaged bonuses of more than $600,000 each.

Goldman Sachs paid out over &18 billion in bonuses to its traders last year, about 50% more than the GDP of Haiti’s 8 million people.

The chairman of Goldman took home more than $70 million and his lieutenants – as Zoellick once was – $40 million or more, each.

It should be clear that someone like Robert Zoellick is likely to be totally bemused by Haiti when his entertainment allowance could probably feed the entire population for a day or two. It is not hard to understand that Mr Zoellick cannot understand why Haiti needs debt relief.

Haiti is now forced by the World Bank and Its bloodsucking siblings like the IMF, to pay more than $1 million a week to satisfy debts incurred by the Duvaliers and the post-Duvalier tyrannies. Haiti must repay this debt to prove its fitness for ‘help’ from the Multilateral Financial Institutions (MFI).

One million dollars a week would feed everybody in Haiti even if only at a very basic level – at least they would not have to eat earth patties. Instead the Haitians export this money to pay the salaries of such as Zoellick

But Zoellick doesn’t see it that way. According to the World Bank’s website the bank is in the business of eradicating poverty. At the rate it does that in Haiti the Bank, I estimate, will be in the poverty eradication business for another 18,000 years.

The reason Haiti is in its present state is pretty simple. Canada, the United States and France, all of whom consider themselves civilised nations, colluded in the overthrow of the democratic government of Haiti four years ago. They did this for several excellent reasons:

• Haiti 200 years ago defeated the world’s then major powers, France (twice) Britain and Spain, to establish its independence and to abolish plantation slavery. This was unforgivable.
• Despite being bombed, strafed and occupied by the United States early in the past century, and despite the American endowment of a tyrannical and brutal Haitian army designed to keep the natives in their place, the Haitians insisted on re-establishing their independence. Having overthrown the Duvaliers and their successors, the Haitians proceeded to elect as president a little black parish priest who had become their hero by defying the forces of evil and tyranny.
• The new president of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide refused to sell out (privatise) the few assets owned by the government (the public utilities mainly);
• Aristide also insisted that France owed Haiti more than $25 billion in repayment of blood money extorted from Haiti in the 19th century, as alleged compensation for France’s loss of its richest colony and to allow Haiti to gain admission to world trade;
• Aristide threatened the hegemony of a largely expatriate ruling class of so-called ‘elites’ whose American connections allowed them to continue the parasitic exploitation and economic strip mining of Haiti following the American occupation.
• Haiti, like Cuba, is believed to have in its exclusive economic zone, huge submarine oil reserves, greater than the present reserves of the United States
• Haiti would make a superb base from which to attack Cuba.

The American attitude to Haiti was historically based on American disapproval of a free black state just off the coast of their slave-based plantation economy. This attitude was  pithily expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s idea that a black man was equivalent to three fifths of a white man. It was  further apotheosized by Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan who expostulated to Wilson: “Imagine! Niggers speaking French!”

The Haitians clearly did not know their place. In February 2004, Mr John McCain’s International Republican Institute, assisted by Secretary of State Colin Powell, USAID and the CIA, kidnapped Aristide and his wife and transported them to the Central African Republic as ‘cargo’ in a plane normally used to ‘render’ terrorists for torture outsourced by the US to Egypt, Morocco and Uzbekistan.

Before Mr Zoellick went to Haiti last week, the World Bank announced that Mr. Zoellick’s visit would “emphasize the Bank’s strong support for the country.” Mr. Zoellick added: “Haiti must be given a chance. The international community needs to step up to the challenge and support the efforts of the Haitian government and its people.”

“If Robert Zoellick wants to give Haiti a chance, he should start by unconditionally cancelling Haiti’s debt,” says Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. “Instead the World Bank- which was established to fight poverty- continues to insist on debt payments when Haitians are starving to death and literally mired in mud.”

“After four hurricanes in a month and an escalating food crisis it is outrageous that Haiti is being told it must wait six more months for debt relief,” said Neil Watkins, National Coordinator of Jubilee USA Network.

“Haiti’s debt is both onerous and odious”, added Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners In Health. “The payments are literally killing people, as every dollar sent to Washington is a dollar Haiti could spend on healthcare, nutrition and feeding programs, desperately needed infrastructure and clean water. Half of the loans were given to the Duvaliers and other dictatorships, and spent on Presidential luxuries, not development programs for the poor. Mr. Zoellick should step up and support the Haitian government by cancelling the debt now.”

“Unconditional debt cancellation is the first step in addressing the humanitarian crisis in Haiti,” according to Nicole Lee, Executive Director of TransAfrica Forum. “There is also an urgent need for U.S. policy towards Haiti to shift from entrenching the country in future debt to supporting sustainable, domestic solutions for development.”

The above quotations are taken from an appeal by the organisations represented above.

Further comment is superfluous.

and here’s the latest news

 

day turns to night and night returns to day

the cycle is the same the actors not

what seems to matter is the blasted play

 

no one’s the winner in the long affray

a little difficult to change the plot

day turns to night and night returns to day

 

a common fact no matter what we say

the sort of thing that no one has forgot

what seems to matter is the blasted play

 

the long parade has gone wholly astray

far off the road and moving at a trot

day turns to night and night returns to day

 

while all the towers are falling back to clay

an entire city’s now an empty lot

what seems to matter is the blasted play

 

the only truth is knowledge of the way

out of the devastation and the rot

day turns to night and night returns to day

what seems to matter is the blasted play

memory of morning

 

you wake up to the sharp scent of bush tea

before the sun has touched the eastern hill

the clock is independent of your will

and early hours and you do not agree

free education does not come so free

that you can wait till after morning chill

just hurry and don’t dare a drop to spill

that’s just the way that matters have to be

the voices carried on that early air

from distant places each with their strange word

you had to mark and now cannot forget

but all your duty and your hard won care

won’t turn back time or make the case absurd

since age owes youth a large and heavy debt

honour restored

 

each aching slave will see the pirate slain

from recollection of that stinking hold

don’t name revenge that last easing of  pain

 

so many fools who will not see things plain

nor taste of patience that has been served cold

each aching slave will see the pirate slain

 

year upon year each one piles up the pain

the lone reward is simply growing old

don’t name revenge that last easing of pain

 

a form of passion made to entertain

the ones whose enterprise was manifold

each aching slave will see the pirate slain

 

but silence will not fill this place again

now that the fallen have at last turned bold

don’t name revenge that last easing of pain

 

all that we are all that our hearts contain

cannot we now declare be bought or sold

each aching slave will see the pirate slain

don’t name revenge that last easing of pain

virtues

 

truth is best found in small silent places

you find at last the finer goods you seek

and learn that honest things are not unique

 

but do not come arrayed with airs and graces

honour is not reserved just to the meek

truth is best found in small silent places

 

love shows herself alive in joyous faces

and happiness in valley not on peak

not by great river but by little creek

truth is best found in small silent places

where we must navigate

 

this is the point where all our natures meet

you’d think us mad were we to list the tales

so many fools have been lost on this street

 

one thinks himself part of the great elite

another looks and laughs when the first fails

this is the point when all our natures meet

 

you hide your heart and wait to see complete

the fullness of the light on all details

so many fools have been lost on this street

 

that when we speak it seems a huge deceit

a way to suck the wind out of our sails

this is the point where all our natures meet

 

no proper chance here for any retreat

we do not let the train go off the rails

so many fools have been lost on this street

 

and in the end there is no one to greet

nor any chance to balance all the scales

this is the point where all our natures meet

so many fools have been lost on this street

nevertheless

 

there is no question that the night is long

with clouds unbroken in the sky above

we want to give slow-moving time a shove

with urgent purpose we await new song

this calendar that warns of winter’s wrong

our hearts demand the springtime morning dove

return of flowers reawoken love

days may be cold but hope is very strong

all that we know is how much each must rue

those painful stories of a different map

on which new facts and new lines would be writ

but now we find that not a thing was true

each noble tale  has turned out to be crap

and we need help to get out of the shit

remembered shores

 

what frigate bird and pelican can see

far over water they have yet to tell

so we must put up with that oily smell

and other facts that do not well agree

with ease and comfort still by this warm sea

it is so simple to ignore the yell

just keep the eye on that hypnotic swell

thinking that it is right to let things be

in other places the cold presses hard

on other faces and the nights so long

while city noise forces folk to the bars

then there is longing for the warmth of yard

brightness of seas the comfortable song

and in the night the many lovely stars

not truly warm

 

the sun tells quite a story but it lies

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

autumn is pleasant only to the eyes

 

there are so many things we must advise

that you should follow since you have to cope

the sun tells quite a story but it lies

 

each of our choices this we must surmise

has led you to the very end of rope

autumn is pleasant only to the eyes

 

thus you have seen the old year as it dies

winter is coming and there’s time to mope

the sun tells quite a story but it lies

 

white clouds against the pale blue of these skies

urge us just to give up and to elope

autumn is pleasant only to the eyes

 

someone might speak of harvest as the prize

of fruit and seed and coming spring of hope

the sun tells quite a story but it lies

autumn is pleasant only to the eyes

herding in the tropics

 

a sudden torrent washes out the road

my father speaks of an all-island rain

as little lakes expand across the plain

 

wet cattle move but slowly with a goad

thick mud resists and does not answer pain

a sudden torrent washes out the road

 

no one has told me how to read this code

nor how to hold a calm and even strain

in this wet season norms have turned arcane

a sudden torrent washes out the road

The Road Away from Serfdom

 

JOHN MAXWELL Sunday, November 02, 2008

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NAUGHT FOR THEIR COMFORT

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

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

family tradition

 

each ancient mango tree marks an old grave

i listen as my father tells the tale

so each sweet fruit is memory of a slave

 

a rapid flight is all that they could crave

back to the east faster than any sail

each ancient mango tree marks an old grave

 

in those hard times folk knew how to behave

and on which side of truth to set the scale

so each sweet fruit is memory of a slave

 

we can’t know if they cursed and then forgave

that’s not recorded on the bill of sale

each ancient mango tree marks an old grave

 

so many symbols here that we could save

to make into our kind of holy grail

so each sweet fruit is memory of a slave

 

those lives were ordinary nothing brave

about survival only not to fail

each ancient mango tree marks an old grave

so each sweet fruit is memory of a slave

before sunset

 

in deepest silence thunder is most loud

so long to wait as sun falls into night

so many hope that all will turn out right

each of us hopes the world will make us proud

for far too long  heads bent beneath the cloud

we’ve let the fools define honest delight

and only said what they let us recite

it was so easy to stay in the crowd

now it is hard to be so cool and calm

as any pebble in a winter stream

when worlds depend upon more than just art

but tired bodies ache for some soft balm

it is not easy to blank out each dream

for joy insists on filling each sore heart

possibility

 

this is bright sunrise on a golden shore

a smile that ends confusion and old night

we get the honest gifts and something more

 

we’d reached the point where breathing was a chore

day after day the tales added to fright

this is bright sunshine on a golden shore

 

the face the voice that millions would adore

when at the last they come into our sight

we get the honest gifts and something more

 

knowledge that hope has evened up the score

our chances now are far better than slight

this is bright sunshine on a golden shore

 

we turn away from all that we abhor

to cleanse the stain and wash away the blight

we get the honest gifts and something more

 

together now we open this new door

and go outside to set the world aright

this is bright sunshine on a golden shore

we get the honest gifts and something more

The USA — Free At Last?

 

 

John Maxwell

 

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

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

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

 

Free at Last ?

The statistics tell some of the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

take a deep breath

 

only the wise know just how great is chance

so many fools think gods have things in hand

or huge and smelly demons stalk the land

and dragons must be faced with steady lance 

by men who on their fair chargers will prance

the holy folk who know facts in advance

turn out right quickly not to understand

the difference between brain and upright gland

and blame as magic what is normal dance

we who have watched in silence and in pain

for these long years as matters have got worse

could sense no sure relief from these hard jars

no certain ending to the acid rain

the world was groaning under weighty curse

but clouds have broken and we see the stars

reading significance

 

we listened hard and heard as ocean broke

on quiet beaches and the foamy white

fingers of immense force seemed to delight

in what they touched let our tired feet soak

in the warm salty pleasure of each stroke

of that great hand the day was sharp and  bright

and the whole universe seemed ours by right

we laughed and thought we understood the joke

so much of knowledge is how each can feel

a world of magics at the skin’s tight end

without a sense of energy or strain

this case is settled on the first appeal

because we find that each can best attend

to matters that are well set out and plain

Jamaica for Sale

 

 

 

John Maxwell

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the observer

 

it is my task only to note the hap

you may not ask me to take up a side

there is no honest claim here to abide

nor to pass on just listen for the clap

of daily thunder and wait for the snap

as rushing fools in their great haste collide

and will not yield because of spite or pride

when you see this you understand the trap

the only job that pays has its own cost

you won’t find out until you’ve signed the form

and by that time you are no longer whole

but fallen deep among the wholly lost

ashamed to say you had not felt the storm

but sorry at the low price of your soul

some sort of game

 

no one expects the answer to be quick

a simple matter is not what we know

still pride demands that we give the last lick

 

after warm rain cold air makes the fog thick

but it would take a fool to want breeze blow

no one expects the answer to be quick

 

you were taught long ago the price of brick

and how to make the faster ones go slow

still pride demands that we give the last lick

 

to those who demonstrate that they are thick

in spite of all the efforts that we show

no one expects the answer to be quick

 

only that some good sense be made to stick

within the hardest heads with no outflow

still pride demands that we give the last lick

 

on the behinds of those who think to prick

our solid patience and escape the blow

no one expects the answer to be quick

still pride demands that we give the last lick

no king returns

 

we wait for rescue and beseech for aid

lacking in energy to build our hope

we’d hang ourselves had we a length of rope

our teachers have worked well we are afraid

of secret forces that have been arrayed

against our interests and we cannot cope

with any hard idea we need soft soap

to soothe us now as we accept the blade

those who would warn have nothing more to say

in all this noise and might as well shut up

letting what happens simply take its course

the foolish are supposed to have their way

while we’re constrained to drink from the dark cup

and see the final cost of all their force

evaluation

 

so much was lost and now so much is found

each tiny gain has much to signify

yet still the fear that we may run aground

 

a single word can the whole world astound

and utter silence be the best reply

so much was lost and now so much is found

 

now all may see beyond the narrow bound

set by our masters and reject the lie

yet still the fear that we may run aground

 

in solemn order we shall soon expound

upon just meanings and true reasons why

so much was lost and now so much is found

 

you would have bowed if  one of them had frowned

can stand upright now under this clear sky

yet still the fear that we may run aground

 

these are the times we have with glory crowned

made into visions pleasing to each eye

so much was lost and now so much is found

yet still the fear that we may run aground

landing at midday

 those massive towers that seem to draw in cloud

on rainy days now stand revealed and clear

clean and beguiling in the autumn air

announcing more than properly allowed

to those who pass to the amazing crowd

who pause to think and to those brave who dare

to tell us what is right and what is fair

the truths that make us stand up tall and proud

now fun inheres in many things we make

both in real life and all the times we dream

hope into being for our better days

all of our joy is in what we partake

with fellow framers of the human meme

creating subjects for a higher gaze

so now applause

 

the age of miracles is not yet past

we see the light and are constrained to weep

at finding out that we have got off cheap

 

while others suffered from the sudden blast

and learned the price of what they got to keep

the age of miracles is not yet past

 

this turning world now seems to move too fast

for those of us who have no time to sleep

while others think that centuries just creep

the age of miracles is not yet past

blue

 

when the storms break change comes upon the land

new rivers rise each clearing a fresh course

having pushed up from a surprising source

that is a matter we can understand

in books and pictures we might think it grand

a fact of nature each fool would endorse

as being nothing more than goodly force

and proof that death is but a gentle hand

we let things happen and they do not slip

past our control into some roaring drain

as blank-faced masses wait to see things pass

value remains beyond each rise or dip

that has been measured or been written plain

and we see clearly through transparent glass

ill fares the land

 

you counted golden the worth of your name

now see it tarnished by this acid rain

not generations will remove the stain

of knowing you thought life and death a game

worth playing just so you won greatest fame

while blood and water swirl down every drain

and soldiers’laugh at each new orphan’s pain

you speak of cities that might feel the flame

so fools cry out and call on you for aid

while skies turn darker and rivers run dry

your mighty shadow seems to many blessed

by divine power so you lead the parade

smiling as you’re the focus of each eye

ready to guide us on with massive zest

but not so eager to confront the test

at sight of hardship your star seems to fade

and calls for effort lead your force to die

we ask for help but you won’t make the grade

instead you look down from a brazen sky

as the red sun sinks into furthest west

the journey’s long the hills hard to ascend

but choosing you is something we could mend

Foolish Virgins & the Wrath to Come

 

 

John Maxwell

 

Eighty years ago the giant American company, General Motors decided on a strategy to sell cars, not Just to sell cars but to convert first the United States into an automobile owning democracy. ‘Automobile’ – a heavy and clumsy word, conveyed subtle hints of free range, autonomy and capitalist self determination. ‘Car’ – on the other hand was redolent of old fashioned modes of transport like street cars and railway cars all public transportation.

Though it was never put in these terms, automobiles would be the motive power behind leaving the herd and joining the rat race.

Beginning in the twenties, GM conducted widespread PR campaigns against public transportation, particularly aimed at getting streetcars – trams – off the roads. streetcars, buses and trains were limiting to personal mobility GM said.  Although no one had noticed those limitations before, GM was selling the idea that cars were the ticket to the wide open spaces of America, although few roads then existed to get to those wide open spaces and there wasn’t much to be done there, except for hikers, nature-lovers and gangsters looking for places to dump dead bodies.

General Motors, through a dummy corporation, began buying up tramways and shutting them down on the ground that they were old fashioned, slow and got in the way of cars. in collusion with Standard Oil of California and Firestone (tyres) GM bought the largest makers of buses in the US so that public and private transportation would not only be controlled by Detroit but tied to the internal combustion engine.

Americans loved their cars. Some early movies seemed to be more about cars than people and pretty soon the charms of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” were blown away in the exhausts from “Route 66″ where you could get your kicks fleeing dead ends like New York and Boston for the wide open soullessness of Bakersfield Calif or Oklahoma City, which was ‘mighty pretty’.

‘A basketful of King Cobras’

Detroit built automobiles, big, clumsy vehicles with soft suspensions and inefficient engines. In the 1950s writer Tom McCahill reviewed new cars for Mechanix Illustrated magazine though he continually lambasted American automakers for their sloppy suspension and inefficient engines. He once criticised the suspension of Ford’s Edsel as so dangerous that “I wouldn’t own one except with the export kit; without stiffer suspension, a car with so much performance could prove similar to opening a Christmas basket full of King Cobras in a small room with the lights out”.

But McCahill  was also a nationalist and went along with the US auto industry as it defied  commonsense and continued building gas guzzlers. Of course, at that time, gasoline was priced in cents per gallon, not dollars. But California was already beginning to enforce fuel consumption and air pollution standards on cars,  so they can’t say they didn’t know which way the wind was blowing. McCahill did tend to laugh at the small European and Japanese cars which were beginning to nibble at GM’s near monopoly on the US market.

out past the blue

 

to reach the realm that lies beyond the sun

takes so much effort that most folk will fold

their angry hands and let their eyes grow cold

tell you their patience long ago was done

you have to finish before you’ve begun

and understand the lies you have been told

it is too hard these days to be true bold

and reach out past the stars just for the fun

what good is given we shall have to take

not with a smile but with a steady look

just so each knows the proper word to say

the world we leave is easy to forsake

and much is written in the golden book

but that is matter for a calmer day

so now change

 

the autumn flower’s not delicate of kind

but sturdy growth is what we most desire

a stunning smile then winter’s stern attire

we must take on these are the goods we find

as times grow stern to our hard tasks we bind

so many wishes and we hope the choir

sings just as clearly as the days require

for all our visions now have left us blind

so much that’s good has passed out of plain sight

into the dust where we cannot recall

just how to make what should matter suffice

but now fresh day has come out of the night

and there’s no reason for a soul to stall

while double sixes come up on the dice

a simple matrix

 

those who mean well end up not knowing much

our very reason in the end rebels

at what are simple but resounding yells

 

we cannot reach and so we have to clutch

before calm force absorbs or else impels

those who mean well end up not knowing much

 

we watch the ball bounce hard right out of touch

our ears are deafened by the warning bells

nothing remains but what we hope excels

those who mean well end up not knowing much

human veins

 

knowing the hour must mean we know the place

where justice meets with anger and they ride

the horse of pain this is where heroes stride

in open season none would fear disgrace

since not a one would dare bow or abase

his own deep need before the other side

there is a proper setting for true pride

where understanding gives each monster space

between the echoes we might hear a word

conveyed with clarity and given due force

by those whose task it is simply to speak

of matters complex and of the absurd

conditions under which we chide the weak

obliging them to step out of the course

what has been seen

 

fractions and fragments broken on the head

of tiny knowledge things that have been turned

between swift signals when the court adjourned

throwing us out into the wider dread

of rotting time and weeds in the rose-bed

such were the wages which our fear had earned

in the dry season while the forest burned

you spoke and no one heard a thing you said

justice requires a citizen must pay

for all the pleasures and the sins of state

since honour’s lash is straightforward and harsh

this rule is clear there are no shades of grey

nor compromises on the road to fate

just noisy birds that call out on the marsh

night-walker’s song

 

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

allows a truth that we must never bend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

 

you’d challenge what is said just for its brass

words that would hurt but had no warmth to mend

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

 

not clear to us the road through the morass

nor what to do to change the downward trend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

 

leaving us with no grace but drying grass

and sullen folk who will not comprehend

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

 

the wisest one looks foolish on his ass

nor will the servile bother to pretend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

 

into the memory of the tardy class

as one more message that we cannot send

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

so much for balance

 

narrow the vision and a world’s unseen

withhold the names and much is left unsaid

a simple thing but so easy to dread

you learn the facts and then you are not keen

to face what is to come the things that mean

not merely change but that you were misled

by a false light and too soon will be dead

to all that mattered and will leave the scene

this altered light suffices to inform

our surging hearts of the firm pace of time

just as our eyes catch sight of the grim bird

that circles slowly just before the storm

clear testament to what had been a crime

that speaks as loudly as a human word

royal command

 

to mete out magics is no complex task

a sterner duty comes to try the heart

we leave the hangman to his gentle art

and do not hear the hungry when they ask

for dryest crumbs nor grant drops from the flask

compassion is not what we would call smart

just fling the bodies on the diggers’ cart

and do not seek to look behind the mask

so many lies and all upon the page

that  hide plain fact behind a scrim of glare

we would not have you see the world entire

as simple subject for your honest rage

nor yet as calling forth a word of rage

respectful silence now until the fire

ballade of doubt

 

no one will think an error self-corrects

blind folk see better than those who have led

our startled crew and learned from the effects

that it were better if they all had bled

completely flat and nothing more were said

it being time now to express true rage

and letting no kind words the mood assuage

we will not let the hero get the blame

it is our duty now to set the stage

before we pass into the final flame

 

the kind of man who his own thought collects

might think that there was time to prevent dread

but he who speaks knows best what he expects

when facing those who he with lies has fed

at the right moment when the world turns red

he has learned swiftly their weak minds to gauge

and shows himself to them as king and sage

while not revealing the whole thing is a game

there’s no defence monocyte macrophage

before we pass into the final flame

 

you might have thought of these human defects

as bringing matters to a stirring head

but not a one here fact with fact connects

or sorts the clearly living from the dead

all are just here to earn a little bread

make some small money collect daily wage

for that alone they would their time engage

you might think that a kind of mortal shame

it’s not their task to answer your hard gage

before we pass into the final flame

 

prince you might wonder at these things backstage

but they’re the matter of our dying age

we say the words and give the facts a frame

but that’s no more than simple persiflage

before we pass into the final flame

time for a change

 

your duty is to serve without a pause

those who are worse than you and who must hurt

your heart and soul and give you justest cause

to overturn them and cast into dirt

all of their forces you must disconcert

those who expect that you are just a pawn

who do not think that you get your desert

night lasts its time but the earth turns to dawn

 

the ones who always get loudest applause

are those who in their way have to assert

entitlement both to tears and guffaws

it takes you little effort to exert

your claim to justice that is not covert

against a force that is not soon withdrawn

it is no easy matter to assert

night lasts its time but the earth turns to dawn

 

we find it written in a complex clause

that scholars have no reason to pervert

reason is subject to no human laws

we must to basic principles revert

and from its course the evil power divert

by dint of honesty as well as brawn

until the force of terror lies inert

night lasts its time but the earth turns to dawn

 

prince we are flattered you have not been curt

and have not chosen our hopes to subvert

these are the times when hopes are not yet gone

we might with many choices have to flirt

night lasts its time but the earth turns to dawn

when mosquitoes come

 

at sunset when mosquitoes come to play

their urgent buzzing games of sucking blood

the darkness comes upon us like a flood

we long for cleansing light of the next day

behind the net there is not much to say

outside the frogs are croaking in the mud

a misplaced word falls now with heavy thud

this is the season when thought goes astray

smoke blends with fog in the short humid night

as all our measures pause within the heat

not one is certain and they all seem wrong

in their slow circle all the clouds move right

over the mountains to a steady beat

and deep within each heart there is a song

from the first echo

 

from the first echo of the shout of doom

there was a sense that time itself would lend

the means by which those who could best attend

would start by emptying each cluttered room

in the clear daylight no dull weight of gloom

would keep us back nor hold us from that end

which in our hearts we have to comprehend

the universe is not truly a womb

name what we suffer and it does not die

there are no magics here nor ever were

faith cannot work to save us from our fate

it always seems that we desire the lie

want one more moment simply to confer

upon ourselves the burden of deep hate

The Human Zoo

 

John Maxwell

 

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

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

wet sunday morning

 

once past the dark the bronze and gold hold sway

in this half-light the kingdom of the rain

what we name silver is a brighter grey

 

no one is certain on this sort of day

but would not venture to speak nor complain

once past the dark the bronze and gold hold sway

 

there are no shadows that is what we say

in the damp woods the leaf-mould leaves its stain

what we name silver is a brighter grey

 

with its cold hand the passing storm will slay

dry heat of summer and tie winter’s chain

once past the dark the bronze and gold h old sway

 

beneath loose dirt is nothing but hard clay

red as the rust that wants to claim its reign

what we name silver is a brighter grey

 

it is no use to shout or disobey

the dull commands of human body’s pain

once past the dark the bronze and gold hold sway

what we name silver is a brighter grey

boundary of time

 

a single moment and we see the shade

vanish abruptly as the sun appears

night seems to caution but the new day cheers

 

towards the west late birds head in parade

nobody with their movement interferes

a single moment and we see the shade

 

some other meaning must have been conveyed

in all the gathering of daily cares

just as we note the changing of the airs

a single moment and we see the shade

taking stock

 

after long shadow an uncertain light

shows wintry forest and a frosty town

but we are grateful for the end of night

 

dawn brings us matters that do not delight

the legacy of knave and fool and clown

after long shadow an uncertain light

 

nor are the guilty shame-faced or contrite

rather they think they still deserve renown

but we are grateful for the end of night

 

hope holds her breath for chances are so slight

yet no one thinks that we should talk them down

after long shadow an uncertain light

 

the criminal declares that he was right

to let the storm-wracked take their chance and drown

but we are grateful for the end of night

 

what we are left with is the thought of blight

as futures close and each has cause to frown

after long shadow an uncertain light

but we are grateful for the end of night

no need to explain

 

so foolish words and actions will run deep

enough to make a stolid watcher cry

in honest pain at the uncaring sky

while to their lairs the hungry roaches creep

leaving behind mere messes in a heap

to irritate the nose and scar the eye

of any dumb enough to pass right by

this haunts the mind even when fast asleep

no one who knows the facts dares to insist

that you remain unmoved by the desire

expressed within the heart before each death

as the proud victim falls beneath the fist

to seem more worthy of the butcher’s hire

than those that simply feared to lose their breath

a pyrrhic tale

 

we reach the boundary and cannot cross
so much of what we need is left behind
we paid for victory with greater loss

those are the symbols which we have to toss
into the bin and cast them from each mind
we reach the boundary and cannot cross

into the pleasant meadows there’s no gloss
to this clear meaning life is never kind
we paid for victory with greater loss

than we expected we received the dross
instead of gold and that is the true bind
we reach the boundary and cannot cross

the one who lost might now become the boss
in the hot quandary through which we find
we paid for victory with greater loss

the dry-stone wall turns green now with the moss
of centuries forgotten by the blind
we reach the boundary and cannot cross
we paid for victory with greater loss

proud refusal

a single maple leaf is hanging on
in dumb defiance of the dying year
on this calm street the autumn’s plain and drear

this change of seasons is time’s greatest con
from bright and colourful to deadly sere
a single maple leaf is hanging on

age teaches us to reach a rapprochement
with all those forces in their fast career
that push us forward but one thing is clear
a single maple leaf is hanging on

those who give most

 

those who give most are those who feel most hurt

when life itself is turned into a jest

by those to whom no greeting is addressed

but who have some old anger to assert

you might not think there’s much that could divert

this river from its course but being pressed

we find that those who act do so with zest

and leave us panting sadly in the dirt

these are the signals that we did not see

sent to the ones who most wanted to learn

just how to fight and make a better home

without distinction of form or degree

some things it turns out we just have to earn

and it is easier to stay than roam

The People are the Change

 

 

 

John Maxwell

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

spiritual healing

 

there is no meaning written on the blue

we ask and ask yet there is no reply

we make things up and claim that they are true

 

no certainties are left the world’s askew

all we’ve been told turns out to be a lie

there is no meaning written on the blue

 

there is no need for any ballyhoo

nor reason to praise those who are so sly

we make things up and claim that they are true

 

it does not matter if we change the view

or claim that evil comes to those who pry

there is no meaning written on the blue

 

we kept no secrets from the bird that flew

above our heads it merely passed us by

we make things up and claim that they are true

 

you think that your discoveries are new

yet they are old and rotten and so dry

there is no meaning written on the blue

we make things up and claim that they are true

semaphore

 

signals that are delayed upon the hill

remind us of a time when we were young

and many discords were cheerily sung

 

we face the future with uncertain will

our hopes have been sent out today among

signals that are delayed upon the hill

 

there was no reason to receive a thrill

from any touch of human hand or tongue

instead we found that other folk had hung

signals that are delayed upon the hill

areopagitica

 

words in daylight uttered without least dread

have not the echo of the chilly dark

when into emptiness we might embark

look up right now and see the bird is sped

that bore the message and now in its stead

we’re left to kindle one remaining spark

this morning when the trees are bare and stark

knowing so many words were left unsaid

some might expect a choice but if we feign

not to give in but to attempt the height

would laugh to see us fail to reach the stars

rather they’d say the clouds will promise rain

a storm is coming and behind it night

yet here we stand on the green hill of mars

simple truth

we reach for magic
and finding it we must fall
yet so much glory

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mercenary

no need to mention all that has been told

those sighs that pass when so much has been said

to fill not time but worlds entire with dread

but this belongs they tell us to the old

not those who in those ranks have been enrolled

to fight hard battles for a little bread

not wondering what happens to the dead

nor why they take such risks for tawdry gold

now we must ask for mercy and receive

what gifts we can and hope for something more

while there is light right here where no dogs bark

as the earth turns while soft voices deceive

and not so gently we are shown the door

and told to take our guerdon in the dark

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Investors in limbo

JOHN MAXWELL Sunday, December 14, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entitlements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another world

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

“The project is receiving funding of US$100 million from Spanish investors and US$80 million from Jamaica’s National Commercial Bank and will provide employment for more than 1,000 Jamaicans at a time when other hotel projects, including Trelawny’s multi-billion-dollar Harmony Cove and the 2,000-room Excellence Group rest in limbo.(http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20081207/lead/lead2.html)

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright 2008 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

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of a xtian commonwealth

sacred police watch every word we send
to keep us safe they tell us as they strike
so we must pray or at the least pretend

into the background each one has to blend
no hostile sound should ever reach the mike
sacred police watch every word we send

there is no one on whom we can depend
into each back they’ll gladly shove the spike
so we must pray or at the least pretend

to be the ones who their message will vend
as gospel to the rich and poor alike
sacred police watch every word we send

we have to note each new official trend
who is in charge and who will take a hike
so we must pray or at the least pretend

that we are pleased to thank and to commend
the masters of this everlasting reich
sacred police watch every word we send
so we must pray or at the least pretend

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of man

our brothers are the crocodile and fox
who see the world as made up of their prey
hope fled this place and dwells among the rocks

the shepherds fled and left to us their flocks
and they grow scrawnier and waste away
our brothers are the crocodile and fox

not for us here the tyranny of clocks
our kingdom is a place of joy and play
hope fled this place and dwells among the rocks

waiting to see what else is in the box
and what new lies we will think up to say
our brothers are the crocodile and fox

we can’t take more of their assaults and shocks
before we fall into complete decay
hope fled this place and dwells among the rocks

a monster listens and then loudly mocks
since any that would win must first betray
our brothers are the crocodile and fox
hope fled this place and dwells among the rocks

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of commonwealth

 

against this massive force no one could dare

raise single hand or malign cause renew

we come together out of more than fear

 

this is a strength that will divide and share

will cut the cord as well as turn the screw

against this massive force no one could dare

 

utter a word we have the might to spare

or to destroy to break up or to glue

we come together out of more than fear

 

the leopard has to lie down with the hare

that sort of thing is proper not undue

against this massive force no one would dare

 

make their small challenge for we can declare

triumph complete with no more ballyhoo

we come together out of more than fear

 

our voices speak command over the air

our craft control wherever we can view

against this massive force no one would dare

we come together out of more than fear

of the kingdom of darkness

the empire’s ghost sits crowned upon its grave
obedience is a habit and we bow
the mind and not the body is the slave

there was no wise tradition left to save
so it was easy our weak hearts to cow
the empire’s ghost sits crowned upon its grave

its reedy music now the voice of knave
and thieving blackbird its nest will endow
the mind and not the body is the slave

to serve and cringe while holy fools will rave
of sacred duties we can’t disavow
the empire’s ghost sits crowned upon its grave

we bend our heads and study to behave
the proper way since we have learned just how
the mind and not the body is the slave

to pains and pleasures we’ve been made to crave
just so we bend and pull the heavy plough
the empire’s ghost sits crowned upon its grave
the mind and not the body is the slave

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The Wealth of the Poor

John Maxwell

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

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

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

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

listening

this is the secret spoken into night

by children and old men so many times

watching as yellow moonbeam slowly climbs

along the wall and thinking chances slight

that in the morning matters will go right

each painful turn as distant town bell chimes

provides an early punishment for crimes

not yet committed now that is our plight

what we expect is some sort of return

to better understanding of our hearts

when the sun rises from the winter deep

with all the force with which a man might yearn

for kinder days and all our human arts

brought to effect these are the thoughts we keep

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what came

what came at the beginning was mistake
words uttered by a fool and said in haste
that altered nothing and were soon erased
the wisest turning swiftly to a flake
meanings unclear and symbols made opaque
by those whose urgencies had been debased
so early on now we think it bad taste
all that is left of truth a distant ache
only the wind recalls what might have passed
simple exposure to a world of joy
a door now closed forever to our thought
as into silences our hopes are cast
we watch as others the last goods destroy
and wish them happiness with what they’ve caught

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nothing but shipwreck

nothing but shipwreck is the complete tale
from sunrise to sunset and then again
we rise never to triumph but to fail

all humanity fits here in small scale
from the bahamas right down to cayenne
nothing but shipwreck is the complete tale

our story is the oldest human wail
our fate is limited by a hard pen
we rise never to triumph but to fail

you would not think any of us were frail
and yet we seem the weakest sort of men
nothing but shipwreck is the complete tale

set down in writing in such great detail
the complete record lies within our ken
we rise to never triumph but to fail

the hurricane will tear the largest sail
and end the voyage with a last amen
nothing but shipwreck is the complete tale
we rise never to triumph but to fail

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midwinter

no place to hide it seems from all this cold
just northern sun and wind without warm rain
to ease our judgment of the season’s gain
or loss of simple sense in what was told
by no firm purpose or strong will to hold
as true or wise while light makes all so plain
under the grey that is not quite a bane
to our disloyal hearts that are not bold
justice requires that we add up the tale
of many ages in a small black book
in which clear note shall constantly be kept
while eyes examine all the facts that fail
to measure up as beauty when we look
and heart acknowledge that the world has slept

Virtual Tourism in a Floating Paradise

John Maxwell

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

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

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

Here is the core of the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

age of war

we tell ourselves so many foolish lies

about the past and who and what we are

reducing every symbol to a scar

and so becoming what we most despise

our only truths appear in deep disguise

as if reality has turned bizarre

or we had lost sight of our guiding star

and all the world become strange to our eyes

vision’s enhanced by what we seem to fear

as bearing us right past the edge of pain

as what we learn is given proper shape

so much we find when no one else will hear

the honest word nor see what seems most plain

instead they moan that life is one more rape

auld lang syne

this is the place where all shadows begin

beneath the broken house and greenskin tree

i walk just out of tune but hope to win

the colours do not change from out to in

and red leaves on the hedge were meant to be

this is the place where all shadows begin

a moment here when the world does not spin

as all the signs of what we are agree

i walk just out of tune but hope to win

who knows those watching might forbear to grin

as no time passing they must pause to see

this is the place where all shadows begin

that which was lost was made to seem a sin

by falling off and scattering debris

i walk just out of tune but hope to win

those who have heard know what this life has been

in all its echoes and the space left free

this is the place where all shadows begin

i walk just out of tune but hope to win

listening in january

trumpets that echo vainly in the grey

chilly slow moving winter afternoon

call to us hiding each in our cocoon

we want to turn from all the good they say

claim that the messenger’s another loon

trumpets that echo vainly in the grey

do not inform us of a better day

that is our import we see no true boon

in their loud signal they have come too soon

trumpets that echo vainly in the grey

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record of defeat

against these bonds it is not hard to chafe

not knowing what or who will keep us safe

nor where each danger lies there’s the true rub

a deadly serpent hiding under shrub

or bolt of lightning out of cloudy sky

truth hurts enough we cling to comfy lie

in hope that when the pain we feel abates

there won’t be monsters howling at our gates

no certainty was given us at birth

today we’ve plenty and tomorrow dearth

those are our choices all the while we scorn

the hard decisions made by those who torn

between the injuries of times long past

and those of futures into which we cast

not only hope but all the goods of chance

have chosen wrongly now we take the pain

not out of reason but since you abstain

from complete judgment there’s no better path

between the harvest and the aftermath

out of the vision that which we desire

is not the only evil to acquire

darkness is all the best path to forget

we are in chains because we lost the bet

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the angle means something

always the eye returns to the same view

of plain and river and the water there

forming a boundary of sun and air

so much i thought at once merged old and new

there was no voice to warn nothing to fear

always the eye returns to the same view

where each looks westward seeking for a clue

where day has vanished and the load of care

seems now to double and we are aware

always the eye returns to the same view

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A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

John Maxwell

There is a picture that has made front pages round the world. It is  fairly simple picture; against a background of bombed and burning buildings there are three people in the foreground. A woman, in a paroxysm of grief and probably terror, a man, her husband perhaps, a picture of impotent rage and in his arms, their son, an infant of majestic detachment, conscious it would seem, of everything, but not in the least disturbed. He knows too much, already – it seems.

*             *             *             *             *

Fifty New Year’s Eves ago nearly nine out of every ten people now alive weren’t born yet.

I was then 24, contemplating marriage and, with my girlfriend, celebrating the ending of the old year with a close friend and his wife in their house in Gordon Town.

We were listening to one of about 80 Cuban radio  stations we could hear in Jamaica, It was Radio Rebelde, the voice of the 26 of July Movement.  We were expecting interesting news, as over the past few days it was becoming obvious that the tide was turning against ‘la dictadura’  - despite all the US attempts to shore up the bloody tyranny of Fulgencio Batista

On New Year’s Eve the American effort came crashing down. The Radio Rebelde announcer began to shout:

“The Dictator has fled! the tyrant has gone!”  Pandemonium!

All of a sudden the disciplined broadcasters of Radio Rebelde were like high school kids, celebrating end of term.  We listened to make sure we’d heard right and then Wilmot Perkins and I and our ladies jumped up and down, singing Cuban songs and drinking toasts to Fidel, Ché, Raul, Camilo  and whoever else we could remember.  Some of them we’d met on their way through Jamaica, courtesy of Gabriel Coulthard who seemed to know everyone in Latin America and brought them round to meet us at Public Opinion. Fidel’s lawyer, Baudilio Castellanos, was one.

For most younger journalists in Jamaica at that time, Cuba was the big story and a year later, after the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation had come into existence, I decided to go to Cuba to find out what was going on.  When my mother heard of my plans she convinced Wills Isaacs, a family friend  – to try to talk me out of it. Wills, then Minister of Trade & Industry did even better. With his good friend Aaron Matalon, Wills offered me a year on an Israeli Moshav cooperative farm – which they knew fascinated me – if only I would not go to Cuba, where I was ‘more than likely to be shot’.

At that time I was really deeply interested in the new social experiment that was Israel and like most people at that time had no real idea of what had happened to the Palestinians, no idea that the Palestinians were being made to pay in blood and treasure, for what Europe had done to the Jews. As a child I’d seen the horrific pictures of the stick figures of dead and dying Jews in the German extermination centres, Belsen, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz, the  names themselves seemed  to stink

I never saw pictures of the Palestinian refugees in their camps nor any documentaries of their Nabka -  their counterpart to the Jewish holocaust.

I was an admirer of Israel, of Ben Gurion and Shimon Peres, of  Abba Eban of Golda Meir and Teddy Kolleck. My first real problem with Israel came with their execution of Adolph Eichmann. I said in a newspaper commentary (1963) that for Israel to reintroduce the death penalty for Eichmann was a dangerous error. To hang him for facilitating the murder of six million Jews plus homosexuals, Gypsies blacks and others was to devalue their lives. Eichmann, I suggested, should be sentenced to work in a kibbutz, to experience at first hand, the civilisation he had tried to destroy. That would have been real punishment.

down the islands

the shine of emerald from steady growth

hides from us the smiling face of hell

we have the sunshine and the shadow both

the odour of fresh roses and the smell

of  rot and dung and none is truly hid

from those who want to look but none will tell

any large truths although if any did

there’s none who’d care or have a thing to say

since honest folk have fallen from the grid

and cultivate their gardens for the day

that they have left before the storm appears

out of the sea and sweeps the waste away

making things clean for one or two brief years

until the forest can return to place

and under branches we see the old fears

laughing and dancing and seeking embrace

of their old kingdom and their ancient arts

while on the hill some old fool says disgrace

and others tell false stories of their parts

in different dramas on this very scene

and in the process corrupt many hearts

twisting and turning away from the mean

those who had come out of the chill of night

and taken joy in the clear morning green

knaves leave their streaks wherever there is light

what the boy saw

a sluggish snake of water in morass

black against vulgar green and very slow

the map names it broad river how i know

that is a lesson for another class

where you may ask about what lay below

a sluggish snake of water in morass

as dark and hostile as volcanic glass

but lacking any memory of glow

simple and steady in its westward flow

a sluggish snake of water in morass

under the casuarinas

these mottled shadows mark a middle day

when even buzzing flies do not distract

and all the senses into calm contract

all who are wise seek shelter from the ray

desiring to keep head and heart intact

these mottled shadows mark a middle day

when we pass through we’ll catch sight of the bay

in middle distance through a glass that’s cracked

and in the haze not tell what’s dream from fact

these mottled shadows mark a middle day

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villanelle for a new beginning

if all is measured and comes up too short

at the beginning all was calm and clear

at least we know we sailed from the right port

so many words and so high their import

uttered with gravity and without fear

if all is measured and comes up too short

there is not one who would dare to distort

the grace and beauty that make this day fair

at least we know we sailed from the right port

cheered by an assemblage of every sort

of human being given to our care

if all is measured and comes up too short

there is no crime no sin of false report

to hide our faces but we have to care

at least we know we sailed from the right port

we ask no judgment since there is no court

above our heads in the still winter air

if all is measured and comes up too short

at least we know we sailed from the right port

not going the right way

those who would listen to the tricky sun

expecting that its laughter portends good

are certain that they have not understood

when they look up and see the staring gun

truth does not liberate this fact will stun

the childish mind that thinks in terms of should

and sees the living man as saint in wood

finds now that something different has been spun

into the shadow no one seeks to go

but those deep voices and their angry tone

have more to say and seem today more true

about those matters that not one could know

before the knife had cut through to the bone

exposing so much sorrow to the view

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The Piranhas of the Media

John Maxwell

‘They ate her alive’ was the opening sentence of my 1997 column following the death of Diana, the ex-wife of the heir to the British throne. It continued:
‘As she lay broken and covered in blood, as she lay helpless and mortally wounded, they were, as always, professional, shooting fast, furious and careful of camera angle, hoping perhaps to capture her last breath, to profit one last time from her suffering, to take the million dollar photograph which would put them at last on the same level as their prey, enjoying a life of ease and big money.
They always wanted to make a killing from Diana.
Last Sunday morning in Paris, they succeeded.
It is horrible to imagine that Diana’s last view of this world might have been the flashing cameras of the cockroaches of the Press.’
Michael Jackson was luckier. He died at home, apparently of a heart attack, although if you read the British newspapers the day after – tabloid or ‘quality’ – you might believe that Michael Jackson was murdered or died of a drug overdose. There was no more evidence of those things than there is that Jackson was a child molester, but to say that is to court ferocious hostility and hate because there are people in this world who KNOW the truth and are not to be contradicted by evidence unless delivered by divine messenger. Jackson died without permission from the media.
If one looks carefully at the mass media of the western world it soon becomes apparent that the death of Michael Jackson is the biggest money-making opportunity for them since the death of Diana. The Daily Mirror makes it explicit with a tag-line following every Mirror story on the web. It reads:

“Michael Jackson dead at 50. All you need to know about the King of Pop.”
And, if like the Times, most of their stuff is second or third or fourth hand, or invented, malicious and libellous, who cares?
Jackson is dead and can’t sue, and under American libel standards set by their Supreme Court 42 years ago, were he alive he couldn’t sue even if he wanted to, because as a public figure, and a public figure more public than any other in history, it would have been almost impossible for him to sue even if he could prove that his maligner knew that what he was saying was untrue but said it anyway with reckless disregard for the truth. With Jackson surrounded by bloodsuckers of every breed, rank and description, from crooked district attorneys to suborned employees and journalistic moles, there was so much crap in the air that it was impossible for anyone – perhaps even Jackson himself – to disentangle truth from fantasy.
Public personalities and particularly show business personalities are, ipso facto, all creatures of fantasy. Canute, king of England, Denmark and Norway more than 900 years ago faced a smaller but no less intractable problem. His courtiers may have seen the ocean’s tides disobeying the king, but that was no doubt because the King was playing a game.

What the Nanny ’saw’

As the old nursery rhyme says

Big fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite ‘em
And little fleas have lesser fleas
And so on ad infinitum

I was reminded of this by a bizarre story in the Sunday Times of London. The beginning of the story should prepare you for whoppers to come:

“Grace Rwaramba who cared for King of Pop and his children has shocking secrets of his addictions and bizarre nomadic life.”

This elaborate work of art details how Grace the Nanny, fired by Jackson in 2008, was “working through her phone calls to LA on Friday, desperately trying to ensure that the children were comforted after losing their father, she sobbed and screamed and became more incoherent.
“Yes, this is it . . . because (crying) this is it . . . because he started avoiding everything. We were trying to help him and they fired me because of this (sobs).”
Yet, not knowing where the children were and not having spoken to them, Grace Rwaramba, in a London hotel, informs the credulous Times reporter that –

‘the children had been anxious about their father and had been trying to care for him — “he hasn’t been eating and the kids have been so scared for him”.
‘Worried by the endless goings on in the Jackson compound Grace turned to me at the end and said: “The youngest one has been saying, ‘God should have taken me not him’.”

Clearly, Grace is either telepathic or psychopathic.
Why was the Times interviewing the nanny in the first place? They are silent about this, but clearly the intention was to dish up as much dirt as possible to coincide with what would have been a triumphal return for the King of Pop in 50 concerts sold out almost as soon as they were announced.
It’s a dirty job, but hey! someone has to do it.
The Times is owned by the world’s voyeur in chief, Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Sun, the News of the World and the New York Post a well as the unfair and unbalanced Fox TV news network.
Other newspapers were not much better except that most of them seemed somewhat more discreet with rumours and hearsay.

 

Blaming the fans

In the Times the lady who wrote “What the Nanny saw” followed up with a learned disquisition entitled “The fans killed their idol; they always do”
Disingenuously she tries to turn the blame onto the fans and away from the real criminals:
“We know how the stars loathe the paparazzi, smash their lenses, call them — as Hugh Grant did this week — wankers and losers. But what they can’t, daren’t, say is how deeply they loathe their fans — their pestering, cloying, snatching, the demand for photos amid a private dinner, the sneaky snapping with their crummy mobile cameras while a star is buying a latte, pushing his kid on a swing, their high-horse outrage when a demand is politely refused.”
She blames the fans when it’s the media voyeurs and intruders who manage the lunacy. She carps at Angelina Jolie whose “fanbase are the reason, as much as great wealth, that Angelina Jolie feels she can demand a no-fly zone over part of Namibia while she gave birth there …” Guess what, the no-fly zone was to protect the mother and child from paparazzi who hired planes to try to peep into the most private moments of a family’s life. If one had crashed into the house, obliterating mother child and father-to-be Brad Pitt, it would, no doubt, have been ascribed to the onerous responsibilities due to Freedom of the Press.
Fans don’t kill their idols; the murderers are in my so-called profession – now, more than ever – a refuge for pimps, prostitutes, sexually dysfunctional and psychopathic reporters and editors, peeping toms and frotteurs, who are the guys who can gaze at a trembling, shattered human being, on the verge of suicide, and yell “Jump! Jump!” as they make sure their cameras are correctly focused.
I once met Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and when I told someone at work the next day the girls gathered round. It was Burton they were interested in.
“Did you shake his hand? ” one asked.
‘Yes.”
“Which hand?” she asked
“Why, the right one of course”, at which the young woman took my right hand and kissed it.
This happened in the BBC World Service newsroom, not among a gaggle of semiliterate hysterics.
This week Elizabeth Taylor herself, in whose violet eyes I would have drowned given time, declared that she cannot imagine life without her friend Michael Jackson. His ex-wife, Lisa Marie Presley, Quincy Jones, Diana Ross, Oprah Winfrey, Paul McCartney, Dionne Warwick, Beyonce, Martin Scorcese, Donna Summer, Stephen Spielberg, Mariah Carey, Uri Geller, Cher, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jane Fonda, Lisa Minelli, Sophia Loren, Celine Dion, Madonna, and many many others famous and noteworthy, who knew him and loved him, grieved at his death, along with millions more round the world. They grieved because they had lost someone important to them. Crusty steelworkers in Gary,Indiana, his hometown, grieved, as did millions more young and old, rich and poor, famous and unknown, people in prisons and Nancy Reagan and KIm Dae Jung, former president of South Korea, Imelda Marcos, black, white and every shade in between, and their grief propelled several of Jackson’s hits back into top spots on music charts all over the world, causing, among other things, a near 2,000 percent increase in demand for his songs on US radio stations and the slowing down of the Internet itself.
To the imperial media Jackson was guilty of everything of which he had ever been accused, like Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley and John Lennon. The problem with all of these and with Bob Marley, Patrice Lumumba and Jean Bertrand Aristide is that they connected in a fundamental way with ordinary people, and that, to the rulers of our world and their servile media , is supremely dangerous.
Lennon said “All we need is Love”; Jackson sang “We are the world”; Martin Luther King, Bob Marley and Aristide preached “Get up, Stand up! Stand up for your rights!”
All of them clearly reckoned without the Imperial Media and the new Lords of the Earth.

 

Copyright 2009 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

 

that reaching finger

what has been lost in that one languid scene

that moves the western soul so we’ve been told

as much as oil and far far more than gold

is any sense of what else might have been

before the truth that nothing was serene

what seemed the warmest turned out dull and cold

the wildest moment most tightly controlled

nothing what what we thought it had to mean

the object found was other than the sought

a glimpse of hope en route to where truth fell

before the onslaught of the shining lies

right where the innocent young fools were caught

believing to the last this was not hell

and what they saw were the redeeming skies

a bangup old time

there are no boundaries in human time

we may not cross or otherwise respect

unless as you or other fool direct

since we are bound to creep out of the slime

ignore the sweetness of most daring crime

and only take those goods the herds reject

choosing to be in sombre tones bedecked

for only silence tastes of the sublime

gold alone rules whatever may be law

in heavy book that we know to be fact

in this reality we have not made

when what seems best is just another flaw

and no one ever will come through intact

we have no choice except slowly to fade

Human Rights & the Environment

John Maxwell

The Haitian constitution of 1805 was the first national constitution in history to declare that all human beings were equal with equal rights, privileges and responsibilities. After a short preamble the constitution declares that it is made –
“… in presence of the Supreme Being, before whom all mankind are equal, and who has scattered so many species of creatures on the surface of the earth for the purpose of manifesting his glory and his power by the diversity of his works, in the presence of all nature by whom we have been so unjustly and for so long a time considered as outcast children.
“Art. 1. The people inhabiting the island formerly called St. Domingo, hereby agree to form themselves into a free state sovereign and independent of any other power in the universe, under the name of empire of Hayti.
2. Slavery is forever abolished.
3. The Citizens of Hayti are brothers at home; equality in the eyes of the law is incontestably acknowledged, and there cannot exist any titles, advantages, or privileges, other than those necessarily resulting from the consideration and reward of services rendered to liberty and independence.
4. The law is the same to all, whether it punishes, or whether it protects.

“We, the undersigned, place under the safeguard of the magistrates, fathers and mothers of families, the citizens, and the army the explicit and solemn covenant of the sacred rights of man and the duties of the citizen.
Some of the duties of citizenship are enumerated in the constitution; Among them:
9. No person is worth of being a Haitian who is not a good father, good son, a good husband, and especially a good soldier.
10. Fathers and mothers are not permitted to disinherit their children.
11. Every Citizen must possess a mechanic art.
21. Agriculture, as it is the first, the most noble, and the most useful of all the arts, shall be honored and protected.
Under the Constitution, the army is the creature of the state and obedient to it; Due process is guaranteed, the house of every citizen is an inviolable asylum, and the Emperor is prohibited from making wars of conquest.
While the head of state is styled Emperor, the position is elective and not hereditary.

The entire text of the constitution may be found here:
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/1805-const.htm

I am no expert on constitutions but I would bet that there are few if any that attempt to define the responsibilities of citizens to the extent the Dessalines constitution did.
What is particularly striking about this constitution is the emphases placed, first on parental responsibilities, then on skill and training and finally on the on husbandry of resources by protecting and and developing agriculture.
These three principles suggest to me that the founding fathers of Haiti were, in the most essential sense, serious environmentalists understanding the duty of the citizens to husband the national patrimony in the interest of all.

‘…the vilest scramble for loot’

Haiti was one of the products of the crazed scramble for gold and other emblems of wealth following European exploration of the Western hemisphere and Africa. Millions of indigenous people were exterminated or enslaved, their civilisations laid waste in a multi-century pillaging described by Joseph Conrad as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience”.
The so-called Industrial Revolution was a process by which raw materials stolen from ‘primitive’ populations were transmuted into unexampled wealth by human fuel in the form slaves and serfs supplemented later by the fossil fuels coal and petroleum.
Within a century and a half of the start of the Industrial Revolution a Swedish scientist, Svante Arhenius, was warning that human activity was warming the globe by what is now known as the Greenhouse Effect.
Nobody took the threat of global warming seriously until about half a century ago when results from the first International Geophysical Year began to create alarm, strengthened a little later by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring which described all life on earth being caught in the deadly crossfire from new chemicals, plastics, herbicides, pesticides and others that were transforming the American Way of Life into the American way of Death.
Humanity began to wake up to the fact that all of us, black or white or brown, poor or rich, were on a collision course with disaster.Following the Stockholm conference on the Environment in 1972, the United Nations was moved by growing concern “about the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development.” In 1983 the UN General Assembly recognized that environmental problems were global in nature and determined that it was in the interest of all nations to establish common policies for sustainable development. The UN decided to convene the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), known by the name of its Chair Mrs Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway. The Bruntland Commission echoed the Haitian constitution when it declared that “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The Haitians version was that no one was allowed to disinherit their children.
The Bruntland Commission prepared the way for the groundbreaking conference of heads of government – the so-called Earth Summit of 1992 at which every country in the world was represented – to design a road map for sustainable development to give all human beings an opportunity to satisfy their basic needs within the limitations of the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.
The Earth summit was an attempt to give effect to the promise of universal rights through universal action. The key element of the agreement, the Treaty of Rio – Agenda 21 –was that every community in the world should be entitled to decide its own way to sustainability and that every person should have a say in this global decision making.
It was a noble aim and every world leader signed on to it, including our own P.J. Patterson and George Bush I of the US. The signatories committed themselves to a variety of objectives, the most important of which was t h idea of community Agendas designed by the people for the people.

Spectacular Disrespect

Few states in the world have failed as spectacularly as Jamaica to honour their obligations under the treaty. We actually drew up a document to guide Local Development Planning in Jamaica but there has essentially been no action to enforce the people’s rights to a clean, supportive and productive environment. The main guarantee of this, Environmental Impact Assessments, are a bad and stale joke.
The European countries, six years after Rio, drew up an agreement designed to give their citizens the rights envisaged in Agenda 21 – the treaty signed by Jamaica and nearly 200 other countries.
This agreement, the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters – is a document which more than any other single instrument, epitomises the real meaning of democratic rights and self government in the modern world.
In the words of the UN Environmental Commission for Europe –
” The Aarhus Convention is a new kind of environmental agreement. The Convention
- links environmental rights and human rights
- acknowledges that we owe an obligation to future generations
- establishes that sustainable development can be achieved only through the involvement of all stakeholders
- links government accountability and environmental protection
- focuses on interactions between the public and public authorities in a democratic context.
The subject of the Convention goes to the heart of the relationship between people and governments. The Convention is not only an environmental agreement, it is also a Convention about government accountability, transparency and responsiveness.
The Aarhus Convention grants the public rights and imposes on states and public authorities obligations regarding access to information and public participation and access to justice.
Jamaica has more than most other countries, demonstrated a contempt and disrespect for the principles enshrined in the Agenda 21 and in the Arhus convention.
We have talked the talk, big time, but we have not only not walked the walk, we have sedulously avoided doing so.
If we go back long before Agenda 21 we will discover that Jamaica, like many other countries, treated the environment with disrespect, if not outright hostility. We destroyed the most productive protein producing piece of seawater in the world, Kingston Harbour and transformed it into the world’s most beautiful toxic dump and cesspool. We did not have to do it. Even in the 1920s when we decided to use the harbour as a sink for human waste, there were well known and reasonably priced alternatives. As always, we chose the easy way, the destructive way out. Our laws in relation to bauxite mining were well meant, but were studiously ignored. More recently we have come close to destroying our premier botanic gardens, an erstwhile valuable educational and economic resource and recreational asset, like Kingston harbour, because some greedy developer wanted to put an upscale housing scheme in what would inevitably have become a private park.

Destroying National Treasures

We are trying our damnedest to destroy the Cockpit Country, an asset of almost unimaginable potential, a cultural, historical, ecological and hydrogeological resource which we have not properly explored before we decide to destroy it.
We are in the process of stealing public amenity in our public recreational beaches to be handed over to Spanish hotels and other private interests and we are in the process of transforming one of our most beautiful towns into a colonial slum dedicated to the processing of excrement and other wastes from cruise ships and to make it a tourist-only apartheid facility in which the only Jamaicans will be those who serve the foreign visitors.
Pretty soon the only beach available to Jamaicans may be Puerto Seco, handed over to the Jamaican people by Kaiser Bauxite who should never have had any ownership rights in the first place.
We are in the process of destroying Negril, fifty years ago one of the world’s most beautiful beaches. The destruction is caused by illegal groynes – built against expert advice – by the UDC, a public corporation, and by sewage pumped into the Negril Morass by the UDC, which, together with the humic acid released by UDC dredging of the morass, has killed off the sand-flake producing algae and finally, by the over fertilisation of the sugar plantations on the fringes of the morass.
The morass is itself a valuable resource because it is the main guarantor of the Negril beach as well as an important nature reserve with multi-million dollar potential as an attraction for Jamaicans and visitors. We prefer instead, to build artificial attractions, featuring imported wild animals while we kill off our indigenous plant and animal life by a process of malign neglect. Because we have not thought about housing the thousands attracted to the development areas we have officially encouraged squatting and the misery, squalor and crime which accompany these developments.
But, there are of course, always the end-of-pipe solutions. The IMF killed off our 1978 plans to restore Kingston Harbour to economic productivity both as fishing grounds and as recreational area. We would have restored the hillsides, removing the squatters who destroy nearly US$100 million worth of land every year and putting them to grow food on the flat land still monopolised by sugar cane. Now, thirty years later, we are going to go back to the IMF to get some useless, expensive and counterproductive advice which will simply saddle us with more debt, more homelessness and more crime.
Two hundred years ago the Haitians said that no one has the right to disinherit their children.
Jamaicans do not agree.
Copyright©2009 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

Republican Parties

For Sanford, or Ensign, or Vitter,

Whose political hopes seemed to glitter

The chasing of tail

(An objective so male)

Sent their presidential hopes down the shitter.

 

Now Newt used the word with an arr,

Didn’t care he was going too far,

He seemed to forget,

To his own regret,

No wagon was hitched to his star.

 

So Cheney he came out so quick

To wield the proverbial stick;

So ready to pounce,

And even denounce;

But everyone thought him a Dick.

midsummer

this is the turning point and luck will burn

whichever way the earnest choice is made

so it won’t matter if you seem afraid

both rich and poor must dance round in their turn

laugh for a while look up and hope to earn

what good they can from honest simple trade

before the sparks come down in last cascade

and all goes out that is the truth we learn

now under the same sun we build the fire

for angry hearts that have not felt the sway

of that fine rule we want the world to seek

past the first moment of youthful desire

since we discovered that was not the way

but now are grown too wise simply to speak

A fi we! A no fi dem!

John Maxwell

Fifty years ago last Monday, an event occurred which transformed Jamaica. The launch of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation transformed the Jamaican culture, theatre, music, politics, journalism and the Jamaican language.
In its periods of independent existence the JBC transformed the Jamaican idea of Jamaica, of Jamaican personality.
I am one of the few survivors of that day. Most of that small band are dead and most of those who aren’t are scattered to the four winds. The JBC was Jamaica’s real entry into the modern world and it excited enthusiasm and animosity in equal degree, provoking a struggle which persists to this day between those who know themselves to be Jamaican and those who charitably patronise things Jamaican and other pastiches of a Jamaica which never existed outside of travelers’ tales.
On June 14, the day before the official launch, the new broadcasters of the JBC presented an ambitious showcase of their talents, programmes ranging from a major radio drama, a concert by the JBC Orchestra playing Jamaican music, Jamaica comedy and high-class soap opera, Jamaican news and a Jamaican newsreel bringing Jamaicans for the first time face to face with themselves and their work, the commonplace and the sublime.
Two of the items for which I was responsible on that day were an interview with Hollywood star Errol Flynn and an interview recorded on a mule-drawn dray carrying supplies for fishermen on the road to Portland Cottage.
We stunned Jamaica.
The papers and the verandahs for weeks afterwards could talk of little else but the Jamaican accents which had never before been heard on radio. Until then two kinds of diction were permissible on Jamaican radio: the clipped BBC accents of Dennis Gick and his ilk with their J.B.Priestley plays, or the real (and occasionally fake) American accents of the announcers on Radio Jamaica. Jamaicans heard instead, for the first time, at last, the voices of Miss Lou (Louise Bennett) Mass Ran (Ranny Williams) Charles Hyatt, “Pro Rata Powell” (Ken Maxwell), Jack Neesberry (Carrol Reckord).
But what amazed everyone was the fact that the news – world news and Jamaican news, were written and edited in a Jamaican newsroom, and read by Jamaicans like Reggie Carter, Joy Gordon and Richard Harty. And, for the first time at last, it wasn’t really necessary to listen to the BBC – which we continued to broadcast once a day to calm the nerves of those who could not believe that Jamaican journalists could possibly compete with English journalists. When I went to work for the BBC News eight years later I realised that we had been working twice as hard for half the pay and delivering a product at least as good as our august competitors and often better.
A decade and a half later, in 1975, I was congratulated for my handling of Britain’s deputy Prime Minister, James Callaghan, one of the rudest and stupidest politicians I have ever met. The man who congratulated me was Sir Robin Day, then the doyen of British TV journalism. With a group of English journalists, Day came up to me in the Sheraton hotel where all of them had been watching my nightly interviews with people like Archbishop Makarios and Indira Gandhi at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference
“Great work.” said Robin Day, “I hear you are called the Robin Day of Jamaica!”
“Oh!” I said, you must be the guy they call the John Maxwell of British television!” and after some more good natured banter we all repaired to the bar to talk about politicians.
Norman Manley, whose idea the JBC was, was never in any doubt that Jamaica and its people were as good or better than any nation anywhere and when the JBC began to prove it by exposing Jamaican musicians, like Carlos Malcolm, Foggy Mullings, and Ernie Ranglin, Don Drummond, Toots Hibbert, Count Ossie and Bob Marley, Jamaicans were astonished at the depth and breadth of Jamaican musical genius and the idea that world class could mean Jamaican.
It was the JBC whose attention to the mento, jankunnu, kumina and rastafari cultures brought them to the notice of their own people and the world. It was the JBC that created the market for Jamaican musicians and producers where none had existed before.
In the three years before independence the JBC was identified as a threat by those whose idea of Jamaica had concretised in 1944, when people spoke of demoracy-in-embryo and the need for tutelage in governance. When the JBC presented public affairs programmes that began to expose the realities of the society many were alarmed. C.L.R. James was astonished by a documentary I did in 1960 about the people who lived on and off the Dungle, who were allowed to tell their stories as if they were important. James thought that this was revolutionary stuff and prophesied that the powers that be would not long allow that sort of exposure.
He was right. When the JLP won the pre-independence elections in 1962 the JBC and myself in particular became immediate targets. One dispute was about JBC’s alleged disrespect to the new government. The JLP said that JBC news was not dignifying Ministers by terming them “Honorable” as they said we had always styled the PNP Ministers. Fortunately we were able to produce a memorandum written by me two weeks after the JBC opened, in which we decided that honorifics such as “the Honorable” would be dispensed with except in cases of official announcements and things like death notices. They still didn’t believe us.
We were always suspect, because we were not intimidated by anyone. In 1960, during the so-called Reynold Henry ‘uprising’, Wills Isaacs, acting as Premier while Manley was on a few days leave, insisted that we publish a ministerial statement by him calling upon Jamaicans to hunt down and capture and hogtie all stray bearded men in the interest of national security. We refused to broadcast the speech. Wills called me up, as the person then in charge of the newsroom and when I again refused he called Mr Manley. I told Mr Manley, when he called, that I had referred the speech to our legal adviser, Leacroft Robinson and he had agreed with me that the broadcast was an incitement to violence. When I told Manley this he agreed that we were right and told Wills to cool it.
A very similar row broke out in late 1961 or early 1962 when the JLP wanted us to put out a news release calling on “JLP Freedom Fighters” to give Mr Manley “a hot reception” on his return from pre-independence talks in London. I was again the person responsible for refusing the broadcast, on the same grounds I’d given Isaacs in 1960. Seaga and Lightbourne were at Bustamante’s house and got the old man to phone me to persuade me to allow the broadcast.
I refused and then Busta put on the Commissioner of Police, Noel Crosswell who said he saw nothing wrong with the release. Again I had Leacroft Robinson’s advice and again I refused.
When Manley arrived at Victoria Pier by motor-launch from the airport all hell broke loose, with Seaga’s “Freedom Fighters” locked in battle with Isaacs’ Group 69. During the fracas Isaacs’ licenced firearm fell to the ground and fortunately was picked up by a responsible adult. No one was seriously injured but I have always wondered what would have happened if Seaga’s call to arms had been broadcast.
When the 1962 elections finally came I was not among the JLP’s favourite people. Within weeks I was again in trouble. In my weekly news review I had been scathing about the departing British. After 300 years, I said, they had made the munificent bequest of one million pounds, sufficient to run the basic administration of the country for eleven days. They had also generously donated Up Park Camp, which I said was simply because they could not take it away.
On the following Monday Mr Seaga with Sir Alexander Bustamante in tow, both dressed in funereal black, arrived at the JBC to see, by appointment, the chairman, the jeweller, L.A. Henriques. They got him to agree that I should be sacked, over the objections of Hector Bernard who was then the Acting General Manager.
When the rest of the JBC Board heard what had happened they immediately convened a meeting to inform Henriques that he had no authority to sack anyone. He was forced to resign.
I was reinstated. A few weeks later the entire board, with the exception of Henry Fowler, was sacked. A few months later I was again fired, on a trumped up charge and by way of a post-dated letter signed by the General Manager, A.L. Micky Hendricks, who at the time was in London on JBC business.
The new government of independent Jamaica did not understand the necessity for the autonomy of a public service corporation such as the JBC. They saw malice in any decision that went against them and were totally unable to accept any criticism. The PNP, demoralised in defeat, was unable to defend the principles on which we had always operated. Eventually in 1964 the newsroom rebelled against the attempt by Seaga and the new JBC Chairman Ivan Levy’s to be news editors.
Despite the first largely middleclass strike and the longest in Jamaican history until then, the gallant workforce of the JBC was defeated and most forced into exiles
The JBC was transformed into a partisan mouthpiece – an image which it never shook – because the JLP were determined to destroy everything we stood for.
I had another innings at the JBC in the 1970s when I was personally painted as the implacable enemy of the JLP and of Edward Seaga, because I had run against him in the 1972 elections when the PNP could find no one willing to run in the brand new garrison of West Kingston. Although my candidacy was solely to prevent Seaga running unopposed and being elected on nomination day, it was taken as an impertinence and an insult to Seaga.
Despite this, however, the JBC managed to recover some of its self-respect. I personally remember with gratitude the opportunity I was given to start the first real talk-show in Jamaica, the Public Eye.

Public Eye had a few signal achievements, presenting for the first time public exposure of police brutality in the person of Peter Tosh, whose account of his mistreatment brought Jamaica up short. People knew that police brutality was fairly common, but few realised how pervasive it was. When I spoke to Peter Tosh he was still relatively obscure but well enough known to make a big impression.
Public Eye was also mainly responsible for the successful campaign to reverse the unfair convictions and secure the release of Michael Bernard and six other men on death row because of perjured evidence.

Our greatest achievement, however, was in raising the Jamaican consciousness about the condition of working class women. Shortly after the programme began in February 1974 I interviewed Rosamund Wiltshire and Gillian Monroe who had just done an undergraduate thesis on the treatment of domestic helpers, up to then called servants and maids.
After the interview I invited the domestic helpers of Jamaica to phone me and tell Jamaica their stories. Soon, telephone locks were being imported by the thousands, so that householders could prevent the truth being told. I was accused of scandalising the middle class and one day an expensively dressed chatelaine in a stush Mercedes Benz spat at me as I walked down South Odeon Avenue. After more than a year of agitation Michael Manley, at the instigation of his wife, Beverley, called me up to Jamaica House one day.
“What are we going to do about the helpers?”
I had an answer – suggested by the helpers themselves. Since they couldn’t form a union and couldn’t strike the society had to find the means to protect them from exploitation. A National Minimum Wage was the answer, but a National Minimum Wage policed by a special office which would also be responsible for defending all their rights.
Manley knew that everybody had said a national minimum wage would never work, that if implemented it would cause mass unemployment; but he, Beverley and I thought we should do it because it was right. Without consulting his Cabinet except for David Coore, he simply announced in Parliament that the government had decided to implement a National Minimum Wage and an office to supervise it.
Pandemonium. Jamaica knew the time had come for justice for the largest section of the labour force. Respect was due.
The impact of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation on Jamaica has never been measured. It is my opinion that in its short periods of independence, the JBC helped begin the transformation of Jamaica from an ignorant colonial backwater into a civilised society. We have a long way to go, but the JBC proved that we have the brains and the will to do it.
If our traditions had been maintained I cannot imagine that 50 years later a Jamaican Governor General would be flying to Buckingham Palace to be knighted by the Queen as if he were some middle-ranking British civil servant.
In our cosmology, honour flowed not from England, but from the cane-cutters and domestic helpers, from the small farmers and the higglers, from the Rastas and all the people who constitute Jamaica, as we know it
When they say “Respect is Due” we know what they mean.
Copyright©2009 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

old light

these noted imperfections of old light

enough to drive a god of patience mad

tell us that death is not the lord of night

 

on days like this the chance of change is slight

we take the hoped-for good with the hard bad

these noted imperfections of old light

 

provide no proper guide for damaged sight

nor helpful hand though willing lass and lad

tell us that death is not the lord of night

 

since other forces keep their moments bright

and not all changes lead us to be sad

these noted imperfections of old light

 

are simple facts not signs of hurt and blight

the signs that fate will catch up to foul cad

tell us that death is not the lord of night

 

our choices do not always turn out right

but we are still entitled to be glad

these noted imperfections of old light

tell us that death is not the lord of night

at the bamboo

it’s called a bridle path but you must walk

for safety’s sake along the mountainside

i’ve never seen a person who would ride

and many a laden donkey that would balk

of going that long road of grass and chalk

look to the left and death is a quick slide

in the warm rain and plenty bush to hide

your worthless carcass and no one to talk

the map is silent on who owns the place

nor does it hymn the brightness of the green

and noisy leaves in the sun’s final ray

as all is captured in transcendent grace

eyes do not understand what they have seen

and mind is turning to the coming day

downhill road

shape stars in heaven no one seems to care

eyes firmly focused on the heaving mud

since each bright hope will turn out one more dud

 

exhausted haze hangs in the summer air

while the old tale now seems like so much crud

shape stars in heaven no one seems to care

 

that’s the whole summary of this affair

if we are lucky we’re put out to stud

if not it’s down to muscle bones and blood

shape stars in heaven no one seems to care