Whose national movement?

[Willi]

Karl, Wignall said the same thing about election sweeties:

Which party runs Jamaica better?
Mark Wignall
Thursday, July 19, 2007


One day last week I tuned in to Perkins On Line and heard him in conversation with the PNP's Andrew Okola, a seemingly bright young man. The discussion centred on the fact that in the period after independence, there had been periods of "respectable" growth under JLP governments while in the case of the PNP, the main factor dogging the period of its administration has been negative to poor growth rates in the economy.
Okola accepted the point, warned Perkins that it could take some time to explain and the talk-show host gave him the platform. It was the standard explanation. As it went, in the days of cold war politics between NATO-aligned countries, led by the USA and the Warsaw pact allies, led by Russia, the aid and assistance inflows from the USA to countries like Jamaica were influenced mainly by the politics practised by the recipient country.
In other words, Jamaica was able to register growth rates of at least six per cent per annum in the time of the JLP administration of 1962 to 1972 because of a convergence between the direction and the "colour" of the local politics and the amounts the US had allocated for countries like Jamaica. In the 1972 to 1980 period when Michael Manley "threatened" Jamaica with democratic socialism, the State Department unleashed on us its czar, Henry Kissinger, who issued his own brand of threats. From 1974 to 1980, under a PNP administration, growth rates fell by 25 per cent.
When the JLP administration operated between 1980 and February 1989, Seaga was seen as America's man in the Caribbean. By Okola's reasoning the JLP was able to begin registering growth rates of six per cent per annum between 1985 and 1989 only because the US was pouring more aid our way, second only to that given to Israel.
By the time Michael Manley returned in his free-market dispensation in early 1989, even if America was prepared to support him on the basis of his ideological change, the motions of power in the world had caught up with him. According to Okola, with the change to a unipolar world, the focus (and the market shifts?) of America moved to Europe, hence Jamaica felt the brunt of this and has been experiencing it under the present administration.
As I listened, I expected Perkins to ask him the question staring both of them in the face. That question is: How come other countries, like ourselves in the region, with the exception of Guyana and Haiti, continued to register respectable growth rates while Jamaica was suffering in the 1990s and 2000s under this "unipolar" world syndrome?
I believe Okola meant well, but his argument just did not hold up, what with countries like St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent, Suriname, Antigua, Belize and Grenada holding their own and posting respectable rates of growth in the time when Jamaica was lagging behind.
In my view, the PNP has been able to hold on to power for 18 years because of two basic reasons or the combination of both. The first was the reality of Eddie Seaga as JLP Opposition leader. An autocratic leader in his time, Seaga's politics, especially in his party, seemed to have been, "Do as I say because is me say so." The second was the PNP supplanting developmental politics with issues that made the PNP visible. In the 1970s it was the crash programme. In the 1990s it was the giveaway, at constituency level, of goodies such as chickens and goats for rearing, free or subsidised fertiliser and seeds, and in the latter part of its run, it has been the holding of carnivals (Cricket World Cup) and the building of monuments (bus park in Half-Way-Tree, stadium in Trelawny).
In all of these instances, areas necessary to the building of this country's future (education, health care, security, utilities, general-service delivery), have been watered down while the electorate has been fooled into believing that the stadium in Trelawny, the bus park and the promise of more big-head goats is as much as "The politics" will ever deliver.
It is also my belief that the politics as practised by the PNP is all that the collective will of the PNP can conjure up. I also believe that the socialist syndrome of the 1970s is still alive and that the PNP has never really moved far from its redistributionist phase of that time. In my view, the PNP has long learnt that "building an economy" warrants sacrifice in certain areas. If the PNP should decide that for a policy to be expanded on, say, education or health care, it was necessary for the government to tag on an extra tax on cellphone purchases, one can be certain that in a matter of days there would be rioting in the streets.
The people want affordable cellphones. They also want free health care. And just basic freeness.
After the economic ravages of the 1970s under the very likeable Michael Manley, it took Eddie Seaga about six years to began to buoy up the economy. The PNP government of the early 1990s was not too far removed from its democratic socialist stirrings of the 1970s. When it acquired the reins of government in its second bite of the cherry since independence, it was caught at sea with the free-market model thrust upon it.
Having no mindset to deal with non-distributive policies/politics, the PNP did what it thought it knew best. It set about the building of a black entrepreneurial class and then clinically destroyed it by its own monetary policies. Its unfamiliarity with a free-market economy was best exemplified in the meltdown of the financial sector in the mid-1990s.
The building of that black business class made the PNP visible. When it failed, the PNP skilfully manoeuvred itself out of the mess and claimed that it was poor business practice - on the part of the business people - which resulted in the failure.
Matters which will have increasing importance in the 2000s such as education and the environment are not "sexy" issues which will keep the PNP's visibility high. It needs more carnivals, monuments and another crash programme. That will not build the people and the nation, but it will keep them hungry and looking toward the source who they believe will first place "a little som'ting in di han' ".
The extent to which the people will judge both the PNP and the JLP as we head into an election will be dependent on how weary the electorate has grown of paltry handouts and monuments. And of course, the unknown factor in the JLP may prove to be that party's undoing, or its greatest asset.
- observemark@gmail.com

[Muadib]

...and, you think the majority of the people are sitting around awaiting Goverment largess? ...and, you dere speak of someone being ridiculous?

For your information, just as those in the 'so-called higher levels of society' plan and work towards upward mobility...using there God-given 'thinking process' so do the majority of our people. Only you JLPites fail to see, even as like the rest of us you all started from humble barefoot circumstances, that there has been a mighty move upwards in all families.

Relatives, friends and acquaintances have moved into the professional, vocational classes...have advanced in private sector and public sector jobs, have started businesses...have gathered the means to further education, have remained in Jamaica and some have left her shores...all working to and being activiely involved in having families advance. The same education system that you all claim is the pits has proven the base on which our families, friends and acquaintances use as launching pad to 'better'. You really think people have time to waste sitting and awaiting hand-outs from any source? You really think we are all fools...and, in you all reside all commonsense?

Mi seh hit areadi -unnuh fi guhweh! We are not denying that production of goods and services should and must be improved...but, to even think that the people are sitting around on their hands awaiting any type of largess is typical of those 'looking down noses' at the rest of us. Keep looking down unnuh nose, man...keep it up!

You obviously are not aware of exactly how many votes are required to win certain constituencies.. do the math.. approximately 750,000 people voted in the last election, 390 Thousand for the PNP,.. there are 60 constituencies.. there are going rates for votes and people obtain JOBS based on their voting pattern.. how else do you think PJ Patterson can threaten 'sucking salt through a wooden spoon'.. as I said before.. you are so far out of touch it is ridiculous...

If you do not understand the fundamental reality that peoples VOTES determine their livelihood well... yuh nuh ready fi dis yet. A large portion of the voting population DEPENDS on Govt projects, road works and otherwise for their livelihood.. stop this pretense Karl.. please..

[Karl]

"The JLP mantra believing that the people are fools has had them in the political wilderness for years! Trust me, whatever choices the people make in the coming elections will be based on thoughtful analysis of the facts on the current state of the country.

Those harping that the people are fools...unnuh guh-weh!"

The JLP has been in the 'political wilderness' because of the formation of something called the NDM.


Don't you get tired of spouting nonsense ?

"thoughtful analysis of the facts on the current state of the country."

LOL !!

You are a real joker.

Why do you believe the PNP engages in large infrastructure projects that take 15 years to complete and wait until election year to engage in largess in social programmes and otherwise ? You think the PNP 'political intelligencia' are fools ? They understand what makes the masses tick.. SHORT TERM FEEL GOOD and panders to these.

What do you think 'More cyar, gyal and cellphone' was about ?

You are so out of touch it is ridiculous.

...and, you think the majority of the people are sitting around awaiting Goverment largess? ...and, you dere speak of someone being ridiculous?

For your information, just as those in the 'so-called higher levels of society' plan and work towards upward mobility...using there God-given 'thinking process' so do the majority of our people. Only you JLPites fail to see, even as like the rest of us you all started from humble barefoot circumstances, that there has been a mighty move upwards in all families.

Relatives, friends and acquaintances have moved into the professional, vocational classes...have advanced in private sector and public sector jobs, have started businesses...have gathered the means to further education, have remained in Jamaica and some have left her shores...all working to and being activiely involved in having families advance. The same education system that you all claim is the pits has proven the base on which our families, friends and acquaintances use as launching pad to 'better'. You really think people have time to waste sitting and awaiting hand-outs from any source? You really think we are all fools...and, in you all reside all commonsense?

Mi seh hit areadi -unnuh fi guhweh! We are not denying that production of goods and services should and must be improved...but, to even think that the people are sitting around on their hands awaiting any type of largess is typical of those 'looking down noses' at the rest of us. Keep looking down unnuh nose, man...keep it up!

[Muadib]

"The JLP mantra believing that the people are fools has had them in the political wilderness for years! Trust me, whatever choices the people make in the coming elections will be based on thoughtful analysis of the facts on the current state of the country.

Those harping that the people are fools...unnuh guh-weh!"

The JLP has been in the 'political wilderness' because of the formation of something called the NDM.


Don't you get tired of spouting nonsense ?

"thoughtful analysis of the facts on the current state of the country."

LOL !!

You are a real joker.

Why do you believe the PNP engages in large infrastructure projects that take 15 years to complete and wait until election year to engage in largess in social programmes and otherwise ? You think the PNP 'political intelligencia' are fools ? They understand what makes the masses tick.. SHORT TERM FEEL GOOD and panders to these.

What do you think 'More cyar, gyal and cellphone' was about ?

You are so out of touch it is ridiculous.

[Karl]

And what the eff does all this have to do with being able to generate respectable economic growth and provide an environment for the majority to enhance their lives ?

Somehow we need to separate this 'party' effery from serious and concerted focus on addressing critical issues facing the country !!

Where is the REAL intelligencia ?!!! It certainly cannot be found in the 'Intellectual Ghetto'... those esconed there have been irrelevant for YEARS !

Motty hit the nail on the head...

Seaga, quashee & campaigning
published: Thursday | July 19, 2007


Martin Henry
Edward Seaga's last Sunday Gleaner column confirms - and frightens. I find its sub-text, "The voter/citizen as simpleton", highly offensive.

The general drift of Mr. Seaga's view is that it is the masses of simpletons who determine election victories and defeats. And since the people are incapable of sophisticated political understanding only simplistic messages can be delivered to them as entertaining sloganeering from the political platform. The political platform he regards "as the best means of communication to the general public" in this age of mass media. In countries where the society has a literate tradition, there is better understanding of the main issues which affect the country, he says, but Jamaica is not a literary society; it is an oral one, implying incapacity to deal with complex issues.

Class Snobbery
Furthermore people who frown on what they consider a condescending and denigrating form of political communication are guilty of class snobbery and ignorant of the power of popular culture, as if there is any irreconcilable chasm between the oral discussion of serious and complex issues and using the popular culture in public communication.

I am from the black, rural, barefooted under class of Jamaican society. I have always found large numbers of my class of origin to be thoughtful and to be capable of discussing issues and ideas and in fact want to do so and can be led to do so. Mr. Seaga's non-political sociological experience should confirm that. If anything, people have been diminished by the low 'chi chi man' politics, not the other way round.

One of the great burdens of black people is to overcome the quashee syndrome. Young Orlando Patterson did an excellent analysis of quashee in his Ph.D. thesis which was published as "The Sociology of Slavery".

What is frightening about the Seaga piece with its forthright analysis of the cheap and denigrating political communication which has characterised the political platform on all sides from year zero to now is its clear grasp of the implications. Understanding of the main issues, he says, "is a necessity if true democracy, not a fictitious version, is to prevail. If the people are ignorant of issues, they can easily be duped into misplacing their support by entertaining and enticing them into 'feel good' situations which have a strong short-term impact. And from a former party leader and Prime Minister, the longest serving MP and the creator of the first and great Independence Five Year Development Plan, 1963-1968, "Perhaps this is a good reason for keeping the electorate ignorant."

An educated, politically engaged but independent of the government middle class is necessary for successful democracy anywhere. Government has poured vast resources into education. The data is showing that CARICOM countries including Jamaica, albeit at the bottom, are spending comparatively more as a proportion of their GDP on education than most other places in the world.

We would have hoped that this investment would have helped to build a sturdy, democratic political system here where ideas and issues and informed public discussions, not circuses, would be central to political campaigns. Instead we are now advised by a 50-year veteran that "those who are seeking a more straightforward issue-oriented electoral system, must encourage the development of a more successful education system capable of dealing with issues. Otherwise the country will continue to operate on a fiction of democracy." A large number of people of all social groupings are turned off from politics, not just because of its corruption and tribal violence but also on account of its banality.

Education System
It does not require an educator and communicator, as I have used the education system to become from the least of the 'have nots', to understand that deep issues can be simply and entertainingly communicated quite effectively. Mr. Seaga's either/or stand-off is contrived and fictitious.

The one and only time that Edward Seaga led his party to victory in a contested general election was when the critical issues at stake were starkly clear and voters/citizens, understanding those issues and their implications, overwhelmingly took a stand. Despite his participation in pandering to the quashee in Jamaicans, this country, including even Michael Manley, owes Eddie a debt of gratitude for clarifying and communicating those crossroads issues in 1980 and winning the vote which turned back a looming disaster.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist.


------------ The JLP mantra believing that the people are fools has had them in the political wilderness for years! Trust me, whatever choices the people make in the coming elections will be based on thoughtful analysis of the facts on the current state of the country.

Those harping that the people are fools...unnuh guh-weh!

[Muadib]

The problem with you and "Motty"?

No respect for the people!

There is a saying, "The man who thinks all others are fools, is fooling himself".

Better than rewarding failure and fooling yourself.... that gets you nowhere fast.

"He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.."

He who knows not and knows he knows not can be taught....

Where do you think the rank arrogance of the PNP heads comes from ?

They actually believe they are 'best for Jamaica'

I am here to disabuse them of that fallacy.. you are my arch enemy.

[Comment]

everytime!

[Mosiah]

That happens on both sides of whatever coin. It irritates me too.

The other thing, many times people just pick out of a post only a small issue, sometimes insignificant to most, but I do that too. I don't usually have time to respond to every single point.

Respect, still!

[Comment]

That's it, Comment?!? You disappoint! Maybe the boys at Belmont are actually smarter than you.

sigh

my point is Mo, there is nothing more to debate here. everyones views are what they are. a man hears only what he wants to, and disregards the rest.

[Mosiah]

That's it, Comment?!? You disappoint! Maybe the boys at Belmont are actually smarter than you.

sigh

[Karl]

And what the eff does all this have to do with being able to generate respectable economic growth and provide an environment for the majority to enhance their lives ?

Somehow we need to separate this 'party' effery from serious and concerted focus on addressing critical issues facing the country !!

Where is the REAL intelligencia ?!!! It certainly cannot be found in the 'Intellectual Ghetto'... those esconed there have been irrelevant for YEARS !

Motty hit the nail on the head...

The problem with you and "Motty"?

No respect for the people!

There is a saying, "The man who thinks all others are fools, is fooling himself".

[Comment]

That could be your solution also couldnt it?. Me thinks you doth protest too much. In the interest of accuracy Micheal Manley actually said that anyone who couldnt live under the reforms he was instituting there were 2 flights a day to Miami. The Gleaner corrected him and said there was actually five flights a day to Miami. You would do well to inform us as to which one of michael Manley's reforms the current dispensation of the JLP is trying to roll back and make sure they incorporate that in their current policy I am sure it would go a long way in their effort to defeat the PNP. I dont know why the boys at Belmont road aren't as smart as you.

YYYYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWNNNNNNNNN

[Rudi]

That could be your solution also couldnt it?. Me thinks you doth protest too much. In the interest of accuracy Micheal Manley actually said that anyone who couldnt live under the reforms he was instituting there were 2 flights a day to Miami. The Gleaner corrected him and said there was actually five flights a day to Miami. You would do well to inform us as to which one of michael Manley's reforms the current dispensation of the JLP is trying to roll back and make sure they incorporate that in their current policy I am sure it would go a long way in their effort to defeat the PNP. I dont know why the boys at Belmont road aren't as smart as you.

[Comment]

Whose national movement?
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, July 15, 2007


There are many definitions of democracy. One of the most popular in the western world was memorably expressed by Abraham Lincoln: 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people."

John Maxwell
The problem is in arranging for the representation and participation of the people in the decision making. In the western world, parties supposedly representing the will of the people are the mechanisms for decision making, in parliaments and other assemblies.

The problem with most parties is that they are themselves not democratic and over time become merely machines for capturing power and for the expression of the interests that have captured power. Undemocratic parties cannot produce democratic governments.

This transforms the promise of democracy into a lie: government by the people becomes government - or governance - by a small class or cabal.
The governors are not selected by the people but by a self-perpetuating clique of bureaucrats - derived from the class that Michael G Smith called the 'motorised salariat'. We call them 'yuppies'.

In Jamaica we made manful attempts to invent a democracy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the debating clubs, the Jamaica Agricultural Society and the Jamaica Union of Teachers, the Jamaica Banana Producers Association and Garvey's UNIA, among others, produced a collection of stakeholder interests which was, in its own way, democratic and responsive to the people it claimed to represent. Its power was its moral authority.

This agglomeration of class interests became in 1938 the foundation of the People's National Party, representing the landless and some of the landed, the middle-class and lower middle-class - teachers, clerks and policemen. Their voice was soon amplified by the addition of the unemployed and the workers brought in by the trade unions formed by A G S Coombs, Alexander Bustamante, Ken and Frank Hill, Richard Hart, Florizel Glasspole and others.

The PNP was soon split by the departure of Bustamante and his BITU, mainly because Bustamante (with an English flea in his ear) thought that Manley and the socialists were trying to take his union away from him. What became the BITU was actually formed by Nethersole, Seivright, Hart, and others while Bustamante was in jail, so he may have thought that their selfless action was actually the first part of a plot to separate him from the source of his popularity and power.

'When I say strike, the whole world strike' he said, and he had no intention of surrendering that magical mantra which gave governors fits and unnerved the Colonial Office and Tate and Lyle.

The same sort of class coalitions had given birth to the Congress Party in India, the African National Congress in South Africa, (both inspired by Gandhi) Nnamdi Azikwe's National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons, the Convention People's Party in Ghana (Gold Coast) led by Nkrumah and Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party in Guyana. These parties, like the PNP in Jamaica, led the fight for independence. They each represented a national consensus.

Some were more successful than others, at least at first. Every one of them was split to produce multi-party situations, welcomed, if not actually incited by the British. In Jamaica and Ghana the splits seemed to be based on personal incompatibilities, in Nigeria on national economic (tribal), and religious interests, in India by class, caste and religion and in Guyana by ethnicity.

In Jamaica, where we prided ourselves - more than most - on the development of a 'two-party' system, we were - more than most - unable to recognise in the splitting of the national movement the fundamental sabotage of national unity and purpose. What at first appeared to be a guarantee of democracy was in fact the opposite: the factionalism allowed the national interest to be cherry-picked to the advantage of those whose economic interests had appeared doomed by the new nationalism.

Today, the so-called development of the former colonial world is, with few exceptions, decided by the bureaucrats in the World Bank and the IMF in Washington and the OECD on the other side of the Atlantic. Political parties dispute only the composition of the debt and the allocation of Pajeros.

The dismemberment of Haitian democracy in 1994 and again in 2004 depended on the 'selling' to the world the perception that the poor peoples' solidarity represented by Lavalas and Aristide were really one-party autocracies, just like Jagan's PPP and Nkrumah's CPP and the rest. National movements - no matter how they evolved - are, in the new dispensation, anti-democratic, communistic throwbacks and by definition, evil.

It is a paradoxical fact that in Jamaica - as in Haiti - the most savage attempt to destroy the national movement has resulted in the creation of an increasingly one-party state - government by the yuppies, of the yuppies and for the yuppies.

In 1965, when I wrote a denunciation of Edward Seaga in Public Opinion titled Sieg Heil! Heil Seaga!, I was under no delusion that our two-party state was likely to develop into a democracy. I was wrong in one respect - I thought that Seaga and his allies would have been the chief beneficiaries of the process. What happened instead was that Seaga's failure to convert the JLP into even the simulacrum of a democratic party helped to destroy that party's pretensions to be an alternative government to the PNP and helped, simultaneously, to destroy the PNP's pretensions to democracy. Patterson's PNP, faced by Seaga's JLP, discovered that internal democracy had become unnecessary.

'Seaga's JLP' had earlier been Bustamante's JLP, but Bustamante, even in 1962, had become more and more irrelevant. The unobtrusive Sangster was in fact, almost from Independence Day, Jamaica's real prime minister. Bustamante's interventions were sporadic and captious. Sangster permitted him to remain the de jure premier while he, Sangster, was the de facto party leader and leader of the government.

Bustamante's main functions were ceremonial. He became a sort of monument on wheels, a 'Big Bertha' of super-cannon to be laboriously hauled into position when required to bombard and demoralise the PNP and the standard round which the faithful were called to order. And even that latter function was increasingly usurped by Tavares and Seaga.

As Donald Sangster told me on Bustamante's Tucker Avenue verandah, on the occasion of Bustamante's wedding in 1962, he feared and distrusted Seaga and Tavares. Robert Lightbourne put it more forcefully; he thought that Seaga was after what Bob called 'a military solution'. The party leadership revolved round the new leaders - Seaga, Tavares, Lightbourne, Eldemire, and Victor Grant. Along with Phipps, Ramsay, Irvine and Wilton Hill, all except Seaga fell by the wayside.

By the time Seaga formally inherited the party, there was little party left. He promptly stripped Bustamante of his residual honorifics, including his presidency for life. All Seaga had left was the grudging support of Shearer's BITU and the Tivoli pit bulls. He thought that was enough, but, as Shearer got older and the pit bulls bolder, Seaga was increasingly seen as a paper tiger who was becoming P J Patterson's secret weapon.

In attempting to assert his supreme authority, Seaga shrank his own party's leaders into political pygmies who offered no challenge either to him or to the PNP. Pearnel Charles, once rated the JLP's most effective politician, is not now mentioned in dispatches, and few can remember the members of the so-called Gang of Five.

Seaga's solution was not military. It was a 'Seaga solution', that is, more and more Seaga, and it was so supersaturated that it drowned the real leadership of the Jamaica Labour Party, leaving the organisation beached, ready for the man who had been Seaga's most slavish follower and mouthpiece, and who Seaga drove out of the party in which there was room for only 'One Don'.

The result of all of this is that despite the inadequacies of Mr Patterson and some of the more egregious mistakes of his ministers and agents, the JLP still does not present a viable public alternative to the PNP. And the saddest fact of all is that there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Violence a la 1980 will not work, because there is no strong leader in sight to go head to head with Portia. In 1980, Seaga was a viable alternative to Manley because of his history and his demonstrated donmanship.

Bruce Golding once said that he and D K Duncan were the respective ministers of war for their parties, but that is ancient history and irrelevant. The only real alternative to Portia Simpson Miller at this moment is violent anarchy and that will destroy both political parties and produce something altogether stranger and more dangerous for all of us.

The entire world is in one of the historical periods of slack-water, when the tide is turning and there is no clear indication of whether it is coming in or going out. The United States' co-presidents Bush and Cheney have managed to disfigure the American image and to provoke an economic showdown with China and a religious pre-jihad/crusade with the Islamic world.

The Lone Ranger, Mr Bush, has lost his faithful Tonto - Blair. Europe seems confused by one of the great historical waves of migration which is simultaneously transforming their cultures and provoking hysterical over-reaction. Real attention to human rights, real development aid, debt cancellation, would be more effective in relieving the pressure and make much more sense.

All over the world, in China, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, the US, the rich are busily building walled cities to keep out the increasingly desperate refugees from globalisation. Africa is giving a good imitation of a continent in its death throes.

Only in Cuba, Venezuela and India does there seem to be any public idea of a future for the ordinary people of the world. Here, in Jamaica, we seem more concerned with numerology and Ponzi schemes than with planting the food, buying the groceries, protecting local industry and the environment - doing the real housekeeping that we need to become as independent as we claim to be.

And we have scheduled a general election for the height of the hurricane season. Somehow, it seems oddly appropriate.

Copyright 2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

there is a simple and elegant solution for Mr. maxwell. He can go and live in the east(as per the sugestion of his hero, five flights ect.) and that should clear up his concerns.

[Mosiah]

Do you have to quote the entire article?