Willow Walk

Classic John Maxwell: Black Holes in the Global Reich

 

 

by John Maxwell

In my one excursion out of the ranks of the working press, half a century ago I was the first Information Officer for the Industrial Development Corporation, preaching the benefits of industrialisation by invitation.

At that time, Norman Manley was Premier and the government was a great admirer of the Puerto Rican model of development. The western world was also convinced that underdeveloped countries would find in this model a sovereign remedy for underdevelopment. If we could attract capital we would create jobs and find our way onto the runway for 'Take-off' into the realm of First World Development.

Fifty years later we are no further forward than we were then and in some ways we are behind where we were.

Oddly enough, the same is true of our model, Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico seemed to have all the advantages. Their people were citizens of the US and at that time, nearly half of all Puerto Ricans lived in the US. Today there are more Puerto Ricans in the US than in Puerto Rico.

A few months ago the New York Times published an editorial "Puerto Rico, an Island in Distress" in which that other blessed isle was described in terms normally reserved for places like Jamaica. In January, the Miami Herald published a news story entitled "Puerto Rican killings may bring out National Guard" in which it was revealed that in the first 15 days of this year there were 46 homicides in Puerto Rico, just about the same level as in Jamaica.

The NYT editorial was a commentary on "The most exhaustive study of the Puerto Rican economy done in the past 75 years " This study, done jointly by the Brookings Institution and a Puerto Rican think tank, said that Puerto Rico's "hoped-for renaissance will require that the private sector and government join together to create thousands of jobs and that tax and other policies have to be developed to make this happen." Just what was needed fifty years ago.

The situation is indeed dire. According to the study "About 48 percent of Puerto Rico's 3.8 million people live below the federal poverty line, according to the 2000 Census. Despite the advances the island has made through the years, it has a per capita income of $8,185 -- about half that of Mississippi. Unemployment hovers at 13 percent.

This is odd, since Puerto Rico with only fifty percent more people than Jamaica, gets in one year assistance from the United States equivalent to Jamaica's entire National Public debt. "The island receives about $11 billion from Washington, $6 billion of which is through Social Security and federal worker pensions and salaries." That s, PR receives nearly one billion dollars in aid every month.

Boojum Hunting in the Caribbean

 

John Maxwell

 

When Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean nearly 40 years ago he was shocked by – of all things – a garbage dump in the middle of the ocean.

In the area known as the Doldrums (wonderful word) Heyerdahl's papyrus raft Ra II, was surrounded for days by a wilderness of plastic rubbish from all over the world. The Age of Plastic has bequeathed countless conveniences to humanity as well as new forms of cancer and enormous collections of litter on land, at sea and even in space.

Since Heyerdahl's observations we now know that every ocean in the world has its own garbage dump. The largest by far is the so-called North Pacific Garbage Patch, an area covering most of the North Pacific from Alaska to Japan – twice the size of the continental United States and discovered only in 1997. The gyres are not easily discerned, because most of the plastic rubbish has been macerated by marine forces and is composed of small particles that float just below the surface, killing fish that mistake it for food.

The Atlantic gyre like all others. has formed at the confluence of various ocean currents, an area of slackwater circulating majestically, slowly and almost imperceptibly until you pick up – on a Jamaican or Haitian beach – soft drink containers thrown into the Congo or the Niger.

There is another less well known gyre in the North Caribbean which has quite different effects from the other garbage patches.

This area of existential discombobulation is much more dangerous than its kin. It is, first of all, not composed of material fragments but of abstractions, strange apparitions that do not poison fish or litter beaches but poison minds and litter brave new policies with the toxic detritus of ancient ignorance, hysteria, and unreasonable beliefs.

It is a place where ancient racist libels still hang around, driving US politicians to distraction and the Bible. It is the place where apparitions like Pat Robertson, Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, and Luigi Einaudi flourish and have their being, sustained by vicious fables invented 500 years ago to justify human slavery, revised and updated periodically to deal with black rebellion against slavery, and colonialism, and used today to frighten and confuse US soldiers and journalists.