maxwell - Blogs - TheBlackList Pub
2024-03-29T08:51:58Z
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But, Can They Read?
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/but-can-they-read
2009-02-22T01:30:00.000Z
2009-02-22T01:30:00.000Z
TheBlackList
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<div>commonsense 714
<b>John Maxwell:</b>
Some of the most amazing things happened within the last two weeks. Hundreds of miles above the earth, an obsolete Russian satellite collided over Siberia with a American communication satellite, and the odds against that happening are so astronomic that nobody had bothered to calculate them.
So, many of us were more than surprised when we heard a few days later that two nuclear submarines, one British, the other French, had collided deep under the Atlantic That was scary, each sub was armed with enough nuclear warheads to destroy a couple of continents. They were patrolling in stealth mode, trying t ensure that the evil Russians didn't steal a march on the rest of us by destroying Switzerland or the Cayman Islands and thus throwing the world financial system into so much more confusion.
Some says the likelihood of these sub colliding was about as great as someone winning the top prize in the same lottery four times in succession.
Natural and unnatural phenomena keep defying the odds. The global financial system has vaporised, destroyed by its own greed, criminality and selfishness. Capitalist journalists, conservative politicians and people once considered Gods in Jamaica, like Professor Jeffrey Sachs are busy calling for socialist or proto-socialist solutions to get the world out of the mess we're in.
Only in the Caribbean are people unaware of what's happening in the rest of the world. Our politicians, central planners and central bankers, immobilised by the super-glue of globalisation, are still speaking the language of the IMF and World Bank, still calling for the poor to be disciplined so that the rich can generate the kind of profits which once pleased Sandy Weill, David Rockefeller and Richard Fuld. The people who paid a million dollars fora tin of an Italian 'artist's excrement ten years ago may still e in the markets in Jamaica.
<b>Deep in the DooDoo</b>
For one thing, the Jamaican Port Authority is still fixated on destroying Falmouth to create the world's largest and most expensive excrement disposal facility– the so-called homeport for the world's single largest floating generator of human waste –the cruise liner called the <b>Oasis of the Seas.</b>
The essential thinking behind the Port Authority's planned destruction of Falmouth is very simply to provide a sewage disposal facility for the 15,000 passengers and crew of this ship after a few week's cruising and then, once ever so often, to allow the Oasis time to release its captive audience to molest dolphins and other innocent denizens of Jamaica. In addition to the enormous amount of faecal matter to be deposited in the sewage disposal plant the new Falmouth will require hundreds of 'comfort stations' to deal with the tourists ashore.
That, is of course,, if the ship ever manages to make it to Falmouth. Our ginnigogs do not appear o have heard of the great capitalist meltdown, with Goldman Sachs and other investment banks laying off hundreds of thousand of workers. These are the people whose droppings fertilise the markets for cruise ships and, when they are gone, the cruise ships and their patrons also disappear.
But our ginnigogs apparently cannot read and so, they are investing for the ultimate rainy day, building on sand for an economic hurricane.
When our Caribbean knights like Allen Sandford go up in smoke, when the Union Bank of Switzerland agrees to tell the US about the criminal activity formerly protected in its numbered accounts, when the Germans, the French and the British take off after the money laundering industries of the Bahamas, Cayman, Bermuda, Antigua, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Zurich to name a few, the bottom is likely to drop out of the Caribbean sewage disposal market.
<b>In the meantime, Mr Sandford has created some really hairy problems for West Indies cricket. If his activities are as shady as the SEC and FBI allege, all the money he caused the WI Board to distribute to Chris Gayle, for instance, will have to be repaid. The WICB is going to end us owing an enormous amount to the criminal estate, and they won’t be able to get it back from Gayle and Co.
Perhaps the Port Authority might be able to help?</b>
The secret to this crazy investment is quite simple. Our ginnigogs believe the globalisation myths and truisms of four and five years ago, such as: Water is the new oil which means that anything to do with sewage and the sale of water in large quantities, such as cruise shipping, is sure to make a few millionaires. The Contractor General and the Public Defender should have a look.
Additionally, the PAJ does not appear to realise that super cruise ships like the Oasis are aimed directly at the destruction of the Jamaican hotel industry, providing the modern 'tourist' with no excuse to go ashore and mingle with the natives.
<b>Bankers a go go</b>
The world is beginning to recognise that there is no function that bankers perform that entitles them to live at such gargantuan removes from the rest of us. Basically, Bankers are supposed to be bookkeepers and custodians of our savings. Over the last few decades, the bookkeepers and finance managers of this world have carried out a wave of coups, taking control of our savings; and under the guise of 'improving shareholder value' – i.e. our prospects) have employed our wealth to criminally enrich themselves, oppress workers, reduce the workers levels of skill and job satisfaction, destroy productive diversity in the interest of more raw profit.
The market has turned out – as Marx and others forecast, to be an antihuman machine, creating misery, promoting conflict and destroying the conditions for happy and sustainable futures.
As we gaze at the ruins of the Enrons, the Lehman Brothers, the Allen Sandford and Madoff houses of cards, many of us will be tempted to seek qualitative difference between them, to try and find something good that distinguishes them from the generically criminal and elevates them into something that advances the public interest.
I should like to be informed when you make those discoveries.
Long ago the state – that is us in corporate guise – was the trustee for the public interest, that is, us in plain clothes.
In every country, for instance, there were laws against usury, imposing limits n the levels of interest a lender could charge a borrower.
In the seventies the IMF and World bank persuaded many of us to abolish the laws on usury, and the result was what the IMF and World Bank called growth. Usury, which used not only to be a crime, but a sin, became the hobby of perfectly respectable folk who went to church every week and did not commit adultery.
Then, the more adventurous set off on their piratical excursions into globalised capitalism. What is most strange is that this Gadarene adventure was led by, of all people, the sober, starchy accountants and bookkeepers who in losing their inhibitions have also lost their own souls and destroyed an enormous quantum of human savings and satisfaction. The World Bank and the IMF are even now embroiled in huge financial scandals going to the very top of these organisations, but they are still pretending that it is the poor who are dishonest, that it is the mendicants who are corrupt.
All over the world there are people trying to assemble hanging parties for the financiers. In New York a few months ago, remember that placard on Wall Street – 'JUMP, YOU F**KERS!"
In the present context it is going to take a great deal of persuasion to convince voters around the word that they should put their trust in anything resembling the old financial systems.
When Jeffrey Sachs and people of his ilk begin calling for nationalising the banks, even our Jamaican ginnigogs should take notice.
Of course, some of them may be waiting to hear from the once celebrated Professor Grassl.
I wish the Port Authority and the political parties the best of luck. I am old enough to remember, however, walking into the JBC newsroom more than half a century ago, to be confronted by an AP story which said inter alia, that the citizens of Istanbul had awakened that morning to find their entire cabinet hanging from lampposts in the centre of the city. The prime Minister, Mr Menderes, and his ministers with charming names like Cayalangil and Menemencioglu were all among those pendent. No one was spared.
The army apparently, had had enough.
Copyright© 2009 John Maxwell
<a href="jankunnu@gmail.com">jankunnu@gmail.com</a></div>
Disaster and the ‘Free Press’
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/disaster-and-the-free-press
2009-01-31T21:51:07.000Z
2009-01-31T21:51:07.000Z
KWASI Akyeampong
https://www.theblacklist.net/members/KWASIAkyeampong
<div>John Maxwell:
The British did not invent hypocrisy, they simply manage it better than anyone else. Americans, Israelis and Jamaicans appear to believe that euphemism and a tortured sort of ersatz gentility are adequate.
Pity.
Real hypocrisy should be attempted only by certified experts. And having toiled in a BBC newsroom for five years as a copytaster, I must be presumed to know whereof I pontify.
The Director General of the BBC was last week caught out in an act of the most flagrant (and fragrant) hypocrisy. Perhaps he thought he was so expert that no one would have noticed. Unfortunately for him, Mr Mark Thompson chose the wrong occasion and the wrong opponents.
The row was about the aftermath of the Israeli blitzkrieg of Gaza, which killed more than 1,500 people, wounded thousands more, destroyed thousands of homes and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
In a statement last Saturday, the BBC’s DG explained what happened next:
“When there is a major humanitarian crisis, the DEC - which is a group of major British charities - comes together and, if it believes various criteria are met and a major public appeal is justified, asks the BBC and other broadcasters to broadcast an appeal. We usually - though not always - accede to the DEC's request and as a result have broadcast many DEC appeals over the years.
“A few days ago, the DEC approached us about an appeal for Gaza and, after very careful reflection and consultation inside and outside the BBC, we decided that in this case we should not broadcast the appeal. One reason was a concern about whether aid raised by the appeal could actually be delivered on the ground. You will understand that one of the factors we have to look at is the practicality of the aid, which the public are being asked to fund, getting through.”
This statement does not make sense.
Who is a better judge of the practicality of relief delivery ? the BBC – or Christian Aid and the Red Cross and the other relief agencies whose special experience, skill and particular function is to get aid delivered to those in need?
As a journalist I have had much more experience than most of my ilk in dealing with emergencies and emergency relief. This is partly because of the fact that I live in a disaster-prone tropical country and partly because I have helped organise emergency relief and helped organise the Jamaican Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management. Although few journalists anywhere have that sort of experience, I cannot believe it entitles me to second guess any relief organisation, particularly those coming together in the DEC
According to Mr Thompson, his second and more substantive reason for denying the appeal is that the emergency in Gaza is a major continuing story of tremendous controversy and that “After looking at all of the circumstances, and in particular after seeking advice from senior leaders in BBC Journalism, we concluded that we could not broadcast a free-standing appeal, no matter how carefully constructed, without running the risk of reducing public confidence in the BBC's impartiality in its wider coverage of the story.”
My opinion of this excuse is not publishable in a family newspaper.
I would like to hear what he would have said if half a million Israelis were homeless, 5,000 injured and nearly two thousand dead.
Or Bosnians or Croats.
First of all, an appeal attributed to an identifiable group of charities makes it clear that the broadcaster does not necessarily support the appeal but is functioning as a common carrier, a public utility like a bus, exercising no control over the opinions of its passengers, but retaining the right not to tolerate certain kinds of behaviour.
On the other hand, reporting on human events entails certain responsibilities, the main one to report the facts.
If journalism is a function of the public interest it must be the journalist’s duty to report without prejudice what is happening and if people are suffering it is the journalist’s duty to report that. It does not matter who is suffering or who caused the suffering.
But while reporting the facts may stimulate others to action to alleviate suffering it does not commit the reporter to anything. If the reporter chooses to help alleviate the suffering that is a political decision in that it is a position favouring people – human beings.
As a public broadcaster it is part of my public service responsibility to present appeals to relieve suffering no matter who is suffering. I also have other social responsibilities as a member of the community, to help keep it safe, to protect those who need to be protected. These are political but non-partisan responsibilities
As a member of the community I cannot walk by like the Levite in the parable, delicately raising my skirts to avoid the blood; the blood is mine and yours,and, like the Good Samaritan, it is my duty to relieve that suffering. Succouring the wounded does not mean taking sides.By refusing to help, the BBC is, in fact taking sides. What the BBC is saying is that the public will perceive unfairness since it is mostly Palestinians or a disproportionate number of Palestinians that need help.
If people perceive this, the BBC quite correctly surmises, it will destroy the BBC’s and the western Press’ pretence that this was a ‘war’, as between near equals, and not a punitive expedition by a powerful, bullying state against a largely helpless civilian population.
I am a seriously unfashionable journalist, because I believe that the proper location for a journalist is between the oppressor and the oppressed. As a human being I MUST choose humanity.
Mr Thompson’s credo represents the tenets of what I call Drive-by Journalism. In some schools one is adjured to be a spectator, to hold a mirror to life. One must not choose sides or get involved or at least, not so anyone might notice.
That is why the western press is lying doggo at the moment because it hopes that the people it claims to serve will not recognise its treasonable failures in relation to the Great Globalisation Fraud and the consequent economic crash; or the Iraq War or the question of Palestine. In all of these issues the Press have been the Judas Goats leading their communities into error, loss and misery.
The press has escaped with few casualties from the Iraq War. Only the most egregious miscreants, like Judith Miller of the New York Times have been exposed and punished. But it was always clear that the western press largely accepted the lies, tergiversations and inventions of the war party and thereby allowed the illegal invasion of Iraq, the murder of millions of its people and the attempted destruction of a civilisation.
The press knew the truth and kept it from the people it claims to serve.
Long before Enron, before the revision of the Glass-Steagal Act in the US, from the excesses of Milliken and Boesky and dozens of others, the Press knew that public finance was being converted into an even and more crooked bigger casino than it had historically been.
There were lots of warnings from eminent capitalists,never mind the hairy lefties. George Soros and Warren Buffet, and professors by the dozen issued their warnings – but the press was always part of the game, a game in which the truth was too expensive.
When we ask who is responsible for the disasters of our epoch the press will find scapegoats everywhere but in its own ranks. If the Press had served the public half as well as it it served Cheney, Bush, Greenspan, Goldman Sachs and Citibank we would not now be in the mess we’re in.
The long nightmare of George Bush is said to be over. He’s safely back in Texas. But the aftershocks will long continue.
The press knew how clueless George Bush was long before he became a candidate for Governor of Texas.. The Press cheered Bush and Cheney on; they were re-elected after Enron, after Bunny Greenhouse exposed the barefaced and super-massive corruption in Halliburton’s contracts with the Pentagon.
The press winked at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, at extraordinary rendition and the helter skelter descent into law-free irresponsibility.
They can’t say they didn’t know.
Nor can people like Mark Thompson.
I can’t say I didn’t know. After all, before the US Supreme Court anointed George W. Bush as President of the US, the Jamaican Sunday Observer published a column by me, the last two paragraphs of which read:
“It is apparent, looking at Florida, that the most perfect system can be subverted by determined saboteurs with enough money – as long as good people keep quiet. If, this week, a hundred or so Floridian autocrats succeed in appointing the next president of the United States we will no doubt applaud, happy, like nearly half the people of the US, that the tiresome business is over and we can get back to our PlayStations, grooving to Capleton and listening to interviews with Bounty Killa et al.
“Most of us still know nothing about what is going on 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.” –"Democracy! Enough Already!" -
<b>Commonsense, Sunday Observer, Dec 10. 2000
What’s your excuse?
Copyright ©2009 John Maxwell</b>
j<a href="ankunnu@gmail.com">ankunnu@gmail.com</a></div>
We have a Dream
https://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/we-have-a-dream
2009-01-25T02:59:29.000Z
2009-01-25T02:59:29.000Z
TheBlackList
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<div><b><i>commonsense 711</i></b>
<a href="jankunnu@gmail.com">John Maxwel</a>l
Some of those waiting to take part in the inauguration of Barak Obama as President of the United States had been standing for hours, many with tears streaming down their cheeks. Some others had been standing for decades and others for centuries – King Affonso, the Mani Kongo, Crispus Attucks, the Barbadian, Bouckman, the Jamaican/Haitian, Henri Christophe, the Haitian and John Brown, and Sohourner Truth and Rosa Parkes and Fanny Lou Hamer, all American. Marcus Garvey no longer has to ask where are the black Presidents and men of great affairs, and Nkrumah and Lumumba, Fidel Castro, Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh and Nelson Mandela all know that the Long Walk to Freedom has really only just begun, and Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King would know that the dream of freedom belongs to all of us and that we have the power to make that dream reality.
Yes! We Can and We Have and We Will.
According to the statisticians the inauguration of President Obama ignited 35,000 news stories round the world, more than 30 times the number published about the last such occasion.
And I, as a Jamaican who has had so many quarrels with the United States, reflected on why the tears were streaming down my face as I watched the proceedings in Washington.
I remembered being at a party in Jamaica in 1965 at the house of the American charge d’affaires in Stony Hill, when Martin Luther King, the guest of honour, said that he had felt in Jamaica, and for the first time in his life, that he was a full and complete human being. That was part of his dream, that people should be judged by their character rather than by the colour of their skins. We are not there yet. We are certainly not there yet in Jamaica and the election and inauguration of a black President in the United States is not much more than another signpost on the road we travel. But it is an important signpost.
<b>Children go to School</b>
There are at this moment circulating on the internet, two pictures of children going to school, attended by massive security. The first is of one of the children the so-called Little Rock Nine, being escorted into the segregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957 by federal marshals.
The other picture is of two little girls, Malia and Sasha Obama, being escorted to school by members of the Presidential bodyguard. The pictures are separated by 42 years and oceans of struggle and suffering, of tragedy and of triumph.
I remember Little Rock. The world stood fascinated to learn whether the President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, would tolerate the challenge to federal law and authority posed by the Governor of Arkansas, one Orval Faubus. When Faubus used his National Guard to prevent black children entering Little Rock’ Central High School, someone suggested that Eisenhwer himself should take the children by the hand and himself lead them into school. Eisenhower, who allegedly spent more time golfing than on any other activity, was mocked by the comedian Mort Sahl. Sahl said Eisenhower was perfectly willing to take the children by the hand; what was giving the President pause was whether to use an overlapping [golfing] grip.
But Eisenhower did send the soldiers.
In his inaugural speech Obama related how ‘less than sixty years ago’ a black man like his father would not have been served in restaurants in Washington DC. Fifty years ago, in March 1959, when I was in Washington as a guest of the State Department, black Americans I met were amazed to learn that I had been served at DC restaurants, albeit in the company of my State department handler. One of my new black friends was a man named Taylor, who drove a taxi (Capitol Cabs) when he wasn’t working at his daytime job, a janitor at the State Department. We decided to see if we would be served in one or two of the places I had spoken about.
Washington had recently been officially desegregated because of the independence of Ghana and Guinea and the expected influx of black diplomats.
It was too soon, we discovered, to expect civilised behaviour. We sat, and sat, but, to all intents and purposes, we were invisible to the staff.
Race prejudice has long been an integral component of US society. The ecoomic backbone of the thirteen colonies and later of the United States was slavery and the Civil War was a disputation about economic development and not about slavery. Lincoln, the ‘Great Emancipator’ had the courage and the political wit to abolish slavery as a means of weakening the Confederates and attracting more hlacks to the cause of the Union.
Lincoln like Obama, was a principled pragmatist, a politician who understood his duty to the people he represented. In Lincoln’s case he was also conscious of his duty to those without representation, unable to regard them as had Jefferson, as being three-fifths human. One wonders how Jefferson squared his conscience as he mated with his black slave, Sally Hemmings and whether he considered their progeny altogether human.
There are still people in the United States and in places where American influence was most significant, who still have their doubts about the humanity of blacks. Many white South Africans - not all - bought the insane logic of Malan, Verwoerd and the others and supported not only a system to permanently oppress and subjugate blacks, but even set up a scientific programme to devise medical strategies and to invent new diseases to exterminate them. The director of this programme, a medical doctor named Wouter Basson, still lives, unmolested and un-prosecuted, among his inrtended victims in South Africa.
<b>Tuskegee</b>
Among the people at Obamas inaugural you may have noticed some old men wearing blue caps.These were some of the most valiant fighters of the second world war, a group of bkack airmen in a segregated unit called the Tuskeee airmen. Recognition escaped most of them, but Obama made sure they were invited to witness his taking office.
Another group, also named after Tuskegee, was not among those present. These were the black victims of an official experiment run by the US Public Health Service. Beginning in 1932 the USPHS used 399 black men as laboratory animals. The men, mainly illiterate small farmers, had been infected with syphilis but were never told what disease they were suffering from
They were told they were being treated for ‘bad blood’, by doctors who had no intention of curing them. The data was to be collected from autopsies and they were thus deliberately left to suffer unspeakable misery under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”
Despite the fact that one dose of penicillin could have cured many, decades earlier, the depraved experiment continued until 1972
In 1997, seventeen years later, President Clinton apologised to the 7 survivors –
“The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist.
There was curiously, another connection to Tuskegee. The founder of the Tuskegee Institute, the first black college, was a man named Booker T Washington, and he was the first black visitor officially invited to the White House.
And then there was the eerie coincidence that King’s 80th birthday was the day before Obama’s inauguration.
One of theose present on the inaugural platform was one who was subect to hatred,ridicule and contempt when, young, feisty and the best boxer in history, he decided to become a Muslim, changed his ‘slave name’ from Cassius Marcellus Clay to Muhammad Ali. Worse, he refused even symbolic service as a soldier in Viet Nam. He had nothing against the Viet Cong, he said, they had never attacked him. Nobody expected a pugilist, a showman, an entertainer, to have a conscience or to be capable of expressing it.
Against all ideas of justice (and even against the canons of free enterprise) he was stripped of his hardwon championships. No matter, in law and the courts he finally prevailed, as he prevailed in the ring, disposing of all the pretenders, and he survived at last in the consciences of his fellow citizens when they too awoke to the iniquities of a wicked war. He sat on the platform along with his contemporary, only the second man to be head of the US armed forces and Secretary of State, another black, of Jamaican parentage, Colin Powell. And with them was Eli Weisel, the champion of the millions of those who died and of those who survived Hitler’s final solution of the ‘Jewish prtoblem’.
The chair of the proceedingfs, Senator Dianne Feinstein, cpuld not bring herself to call the new president by his full name. The sergeant at arms went one better. He called out ‘Barack H. Obama’. It was the President himself who first proudly announced his full name, Barack Husain Obama, forcing his countrymen to abandon euphemism and to face facts and their whole heritage. And he was not afraid to address the Muslims of the world, despite the blanket libels of the past eight years, promising to meet them and all people with due regard and respect to try to make a new beginning.
As we reflect on Tuesday, it may be possible to discern not only why the world believes Obama belongs to them, but why the world believes that the dream of liberty belongs to them too.
Ho Chi Minh said that when he was a waiter in a Paris restaurant he was fired by the words of Marcus Garvey. Freedom and Liberty are transcendent and they are not the property of any race, country or political system.
Bob Marley, the poet laureate of the last century got it right:
“We can make it work!”
YES, WE CAN!
<b><i>Copyright 2009 John Maxwell</i></b>
<a href="jankunnu@gmail.com">jankunnu@gmail.com</a>
John Maxwell's column is also available in <a href="http://www.jamaicaobserver.com">The Jamaica Observer</a></div>