c
John
Maxwell
The
real function of the state is pretty simple: to protect and enhance the
interests of its members -- the people; to keep them safe and allow them to be
as happy as they can be by doing whatever they want to do without damaging the
interests of their neighbours.
The
state can never disappear in any reality, because there will always need to be
a trustee whose duty it is to enforce or guarantee fair play and to defend the
human rights and the property interests of the society.
The
idea of universal human rights is a comparatively recent invention and the
concept is steadily being extended, to recognise for instance, the fact that
the resources of the earth, from which all wealth is derived, must be
apportioned equitably among people and among nations. We are, for instance,
just beginning to acknowledge that clean air and water are essential human
rights and that no one has any right to damage these properties in their
private interest.
In
Ecuador the people have recently gone so far as to award rights to ‘Nature’
meaning that any interference with the natural world must be specifically and fully justified in the Public
Interest.
This
stewardship is the reason the state is compelled to intervene in matters as
disparate as climate change and in the threatened crash of the world financial
systems.
In
the United States, where the wide open spaces of the West gave birth to the
idea of Manifest Destiny and in Europe, where Africa was thought to be another
wide open space, nations and cultures interpreted their strength as licence to
plunder rape and murder whole populations on the ground that they were not
using their ’God-given’ endowment as profitably as they should be.
Plantation
slavery and the Industrial Revolution it
midwifed, seemed to allow the most ruthless exploitation of people and natural
resources. Which is why places like the Congo, Angola, Niger, Bolivia, Brazil,
and other places have been so ruthlessly exploited that their people remain
miserably poor while the foreign investors and their armies so richly rewarded
themselves. It is why the so-called ratings agencies in the US were able to
believe that junk securities issued by mortgage consolidators were worth more
than the bonds issued by starving developing countries. Not only were they
worth more, they attracted much lower interest rates because of their presumed
worth Big US companies like Caterpillar
are now aggrieved at having to pay ‘extortionate’ interest rates of 7% in the
current credit squeeze while developing countries like Jamaica consider
themselves lucky when they are asked for twice that.
Widow’s mites
And
that is why several years ago, when Jamaica and Donald Trump each found
themselves financially over-extended, each owing about $4 billion US – Jamaica
was forced to abandon free education while Trump
got to keep his yacht.
Free
enterprise capitalism has been so cornered by the parasites that finance
companies that produce nothing, have been able over the past few years to
extract 40% of the US GDP as their reward for bringing together “willing”
buyers and sellers.
And
it is why at the United Nations this week, foreign nations – among them some of
the United States’ closest partners, have been so angry at the American failure
to regulate their business more fairly and with less prejudice to the rest of
the world.
The
bureaucrats have triumphed. The managers have captured the wealth of public
companies, paying themselves enormous rewards, while the so called shareholder
interest has been pushed aside as the managers seized more and more power,
allegedly in the interest of shareholder equity. The shareholders are awarded
nice little dividends while the managers and financiers take the real harvest
in tax-free capital gains.
Last
year Goldman Sachs paid out $16 billion to its ‘traders’ who do nothing but
make educated bets on stock and commodities markets. Each trader got $600,000
for a year’s ‘work’.
Quick!
What’s Jamaica’s GDP?
Bauxite
was discovered in Jamaica more than a hundred years ago, contrary to official
myth. And the man who discovered a way to transform it into aluminum cheaply
was, I believe, born in Jamaica.
In
the 1940s however, with a world war looming, the aluminum cartel decided to
look for bauxite nearer home than Guyana, more easily safeguarded from German
submarines. So Jamaican bauxite, though non-standard on the then world market,
became attractive and ways were quickly found to fit new bauxite refineries to
process it. That fact was made even more important by two other facts. One,
that Jamaica was almost 50% bauxite and two, that Jamaican bauxite was strip
mineable, lying on the surface of the earth, needing only to be scraped off.
For
years, until Norman Manley came to office in 1955, the bauxite companies paid
Jamaica the handsome reward of one shilling ( about 15 American cents) a ton
for Jamaica’s only significant mineral resource. In return the companies were
supposed to restore the fertility of the soil.
No one knew that this would be impossible if only the first nine inches
of topsoil were retained. It didn’t matter anyway; most of the despoiled land was never
‘restored’ and despite the fact that a fine of $25,000 an acre was to supposed
to be levied on unrestored land, our Commissioners of Lands,
for reasons known only to themselves, allowed the bauxite companies to escape
penalty and to ruin the Jamaican land , to destroy its fertility, rob us of its
agricultural production (worth much, much more than bauxite); to destroy
communities, sending bauxite refugees fleeing to the Bronx and to Kingston
ghettoes, impoverishing them and casting them aside as worthless detritus of
‘Development’.
Bauxite
crimes are amplified by something else: The waste of alumina
production, red mud is a toxic stew of
caustic chemicals and heavy metals like cadmium and arsenic, damaging to human
brains and bodies. The fumes of the refineries destroyed the ‘zinc’ roofs of
their neighbours and does unknown damage to the lungs of their children. The
red mud – even more dangerous – is a long lasting poison to the underground aquifer which supplies most
of Jamaica’s water from its rivers and wells.
One
would have imagined that after sixty years of bauxite mining and alumina
refining that the well financed Jamaica Bauxite Institute, the Water Resources
Authority and the Commissioners of Lands would by now have made definitive
studies of the damage already caused by bauxite and the continuing threat to
human and animal life, to agriculture and to the tourist industry from this
dangerous and unsustainable version of ‘Development’.
But
since the Jamaican intermediaries seem so convinced that their true mission is
to protect the bauxite companies from Jamaican interests, I think we will be
waiting for a very long time to find out the extent of the damage that the
industry has done. And, as I have pointed out before, in sixty years, with the
exception of Don Tretzel-managed Kaiser and its gift of the Puerto Seco public
beach, the companies have given nothing to the exploited communities and people
they have so grievously damaged. Not a single technical school! Chickenfeed.
There
is one more piece of vandalism to come.
As
I have written before there is what I believe is an Olmec pyramid in the region
of Gibraltar/Moneague (see pic) which has not interested our official cultural
stewards. If I am right this monument would rewrite the official history of the
hemisphere and make it clear that ancient America was populated from Africa.
But whether the African connection is provable, the pyramid is part of the
cultural heritage of mankind and should be protected, examined, catalogued and
preserved for its transcendental importance.
In
trying to locate the pyramid using the
Google Earth programme on my computer I believe I have identified a fairly
extensive set of ruins which suggest to me that the pyramid was part of a much
larger settlement antedating Columbus by nearly 2,000 years.
These
relics lie in the direct path of the latest plan for bauxite devastation and in
the path of the bypass road which is being
built to facilitate the more extensive
and more expeditious depraving of the
landscape and culture of St Ann, the former Garden Parish. It also lies in the
path of the exploitation and destruction of the Cockpit Country, the
geological, biological, historical and cultural heart of Jamaica.
I
am appealing to people like Butch Stewart, the proprietor of this newspaper and
other patriotic Jamaicans to finance an expedition to discover exactly what is
at Union Hill and its environs.
If
I am right, the destruction of this unique cultural artifact would be the
modern equivalent of the destruction of
the Great Library at Alexandria more than 2,000 years ago and ust a little less
wicked than the Rumsfeld-sanctioned
looting of 8,000 years of civilised history in Iraq.
We
cannot allow this vandalism in the name of ‘Development’.
We cannot allow any further Bauxite
‘Development’ which impoverishes us financially, culturally and socially and destroys our communities, our
precious water supplies, our history and our peace.
We owe it to history, to civilisation, to
ourselves and to humanity to find a more civilised way.
Copyright
© 2008 John Maxwell