The JLP is on a roll with its herd
IT was the celebrated, talented Noam Chomsky who wrote, “The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it’s the responsible men who have to make decisions to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it’s a democracy they — the herd, that is — are permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That’s called an election.”
As the JLP ramps up its campaign, certain in the knowledge that at the next elections it will be keeping the PNP horde from the halls of political power, one must expect that it will be taking every JLP man, woman, baby mother and sperm donor to its annual conference inside the National Arena today.
It is no secret that the party’s energy level has been primed with the incident-free elevation of Andrew Holness to prime minister.
Ruling administrations which are on the verge of electoral defeat tend to display the mood of malaise to all around them. First it is the close political workers who have to bear the cold stares of those who they are forced to interact with in the community. Second, at the level of the political directorate, all the big boys know when the tide is operating against them. The energy on the platform, though feigned, is never really as true as when victory is in the air.
In 1989, it was Bruce Golding who convinced then PM Eddie Seaga to call the elections in February, Why did he do so? To stem the extra loss of seats had the election been held later on in the year. In other words, each day that an excessively unpopular administration hangs on to power makes it worse for that political party.
The JLP is convinced that the exact opposite is the case today.
That the energy is there, there is no doubt. That the party workers have sensed the ‘new mandate’ on the horizon is demonstrated in the open smiles, loud laughing and boasting in the communities. At the same time, one senses that the Opposition PNP is searching for even a single bottle of five-hour energy drink.
“Imagine, fi dem nerve,” said a JLP activist to me on Wednesday. “Dem have public trial wid Bruce inna Manatt and diss him up. Now dem waan fi hol di Trafigura hearing behind closed doors. Dem fi tek dem buss ass!”
I was forced to explain to him that lawyers are paid to give their clients the best representation and that’s exactly what the PNP lawyers did, even though the judge threw out the in-camera hearing.
As I’ve said, it is my belief that when both political parties are examined in terms of their election readiness, the PNP has the bigger problem.
Its leader, Portia Simpson Miller, seems not to appreciate the geopolitical space in which her party is operating. Her threat not to honour certain deals done by the JLP must have sent chills through the investment community, here and abroad.
She is very obviously still somewhere in the 1970s.
Issues have hardly ever won elections in Jamaica as gimmickry has done. And if dancing on a stage and issuing shouts of ‘victory, victory’ were real election calling cards, the PNP would win hands down. Fortunately, there is, creeping into our polity, the intelligent voter. He and she do not constitute the base of the political diehards, estimated at around 20 per cent for each political party, although the PNP begins with a slightly bigger diehard base than the JLP.
And, even though the JLP and the PNP would never admit it, the base of both political parties does not represent anything near discriminating, sensible thinkers. They are in place with easy slots for batteries. The politicians open the slots, put the batteries in place and they light up and go wheee!
The ‘Andrew Holness factor’ is real, although it would not suit the PNP to buy too much into it.
The ‘Portia factor’ is pretty much all the PNP has going for it, but that factor seems to be waning.
Denial is also a part of party politics.
The politics of ignorance
Americans are quite contradictory in nature.
The same great nation that produced Thomas Alva Edison, a school dropout who eventually became the greatest inventor in history (light bulb, motion picture camera, etc) also produced Sarah Palin, a politician whose IQ must have rivalled the cartoon character Sponge Bob.
Americans want their goods at the cheapest possible prices. In response, some of their manufacturers ship the jobs to overseas markets where labour is in abundance and hence very cheap by American standards so that the finished product is reasonably priced to the American consumer.
But how do the Americans respond? They, who ought to understand capitalism and the motions of capital much more than others in the world, bawl out in loud complaint that the jobs have been shipped overseas. Well, what the hell do they want?
The world’s economy has never quite recovered from the ravages of the recession which began in December 2007 and presently it is again on a razor’s edge as tough economic decisions in Western European nations become mixed with the toxicity of political fates.
In the great America, President Obama, with no stomach for political bile, has become the hostage of a system that gives a president less power in America than what a Jamaican prime minister has in Kingston.
In September, the ‘occupiers’ decided to send the ‘system’ a message. As I understood it, the ‘system’ was that horde of avaricious bankers and fund managers on Wall Street whose gods were the words ‘super-profits’ and ‘huge bonuses’.
But wait a minute, something is wrong with that picture. Isn’t that America, where a young boy on his paper route can realise his dream and grow up to be just like the next greedy fund manager on Wall Street? And maybe buy an island in the Caribbean so that he can offload it on his wife at his next divorce hearings?
For such an advanced nation Americans are really dumb.
A recent article in the UK Guardian headlined ‘How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington’ had a few choice words for their former colony.
It begins by boldly stating what is plainly factual in American politics. And then it asks an important question.
“The degradation of intelligence and learning in American politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies. How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance?”
While much the same can be said of the leadership of a certain party right here at home, our politicians are usually known more as corrupt scamps than numbskulls.
The article goes on to explore another fact and one that draws the people of many nations to America, but an unkind cut (and painfully a fact) is attached.
“The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.”
There are many Jamaicans living right here on ‘the rock’ who are convinced that a little learning is a dangerous thing. And much learning is akin to death. And, of course, some wear it as a badge of honour that they have never learned anything, never read anything and are only interested in gossip, political noise and the last number played in Cashpot. And the politicians court them ardently!
Our political parties also court kleptomaniacs, some old in the business and others trying to catch up with their masters of the game.
America’s penchant for style over substance has long been revealed whenever Jimmy Carter, the one-term Democratic president, is being discussed. It is my belief that Carter was too much of a ‘human’ to have been US president. Americans want their presidents to wage war in the manner of Nixon urging his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to use a nuclear weapon on the North Vietnamese in that unfortunate era of American history. Nixon in his taped conversations referred to Vietnam as “a little sh.. ass country”.
The UK Guardian gives a timeline on the epitome of US political ignorance.
“Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan’s response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate.
“Carter — stumbling a little, using long words — carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said: ‘There you go again.’
“His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.”
The UK Guardian article is lengthy but it places the matter squarely at the feet of the people. We in Jamaica can also take our cues from it.
‘Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people.’
‘Justice’ should be a four-letter expletive
On July 17, 2011, as part of an article titled ‘BMW vs Cheap Taxi’ I wrote the following:
“I have known the parents and the paternal grandfather of the late Khajeel Mais from the mid-1980s and just in case there is any attempt to place a spin on the character of the youngster who met such an untimely and tragic end to suit the purposes of those with nefarious intentions, I would advise those involved to back off and go spin somewhere else.”
Why did I write that? Well, I was doing my own ‘soundings’ at street level and what I heard gave me much cause for concern, to say the least. Fortunately, this newspaper is not Facebook where every suspicion, imaginative flurry or plain gossip is written with gay abandon.
What I heard was the usual sickness which takes place in Jamaica whenever two forces are seemingly facing off each other. One usually has its way while the other is carried away like a leaf in a stream.
On the evening of July 1, 2011, half-an-hour before Mais’s tragic and untimely shooting death he was standing by a stall at the corner of Border Avenue and Mannings Hills Road. Across the road in a small plaza was his mother. A few minutes before, he was there with her and the plan was for her to drive him in her vehicle to a fete that was being held at Meadowbrook High School.
They were at a Friday evening fish fry and his mother had just placed an order and was waiting on her package of fried fish. “Mommy, let’s go now, I don’t want to miss my friends. They are on the way,” he said to her. The youngster, impatient, told his mother that he was going across the road to take a taxi because the fish order was taking too long to arrive. Well, teenagers are impatient.
He walked across the road, and while at the stall he saw a taxi that was a somewhat regular at the spot. The taxi man is someone I know and he is not absent of the undisciplined behaviour that too many of our taxi drivers display. Mais took the taxi and, within a few minutes he was dead, allegedly shot by the driver of a BMW X6 which had had a ‘collision’ with the taxi.
It is not quite clear what happened, but it is beyond a shadow of doubt that young Mais is dead as a result of a shot through his head, buried and sadly missed by his mother, father, sisters, other relatives, friends and the KC fraternity.
What is known is that the alleged shooter of Mais, Patrick Powell, a businessman, left the island immediately after the incident and on his return on July 20 was immediately arrested. He is facing charges of shooting with intent, illegal possession of a firearm, and failing to hand over his weapon for inspection.
On the eve of the alleged shooter of Mais being offered bail in the sum of $10 million, we are told forensics has found ‘trace amounts’ of gunpowder residue on the back of Mais’s right hand.
Wow!
How did the ‘trace amounts’ of gunpowder get there? The first implication is, of course, the obvious one, but that is purely a fantasy whipped up by our versions of Disney animators and given a sound track.
The second could be that the police personnel who handled Mais’s body were not professional in their approach, in that, where new, disposable gloves should have been used, it was not done. That, also, I rule out.
The third possibility is that his body, while awaiting post-mortem, became contaminated with others. That has happened numerous times!
The fourth possibility is that it was deliberately placed there, but I would like to think we are not that callous in this country.
Years ago, a young doctor of African origin working along with the late Dr Royston Clifford, then chief government pathologist, made contact with me and sent me in shocking detail, a written description of the archaic and downright primitive conditions under which autopsies were carried out at the government morgue. He was deathly scared that it would be revealed to his bosses that he had spoken to me.
Saying to the parents of Khajeel Mais that your dead son now has a taint against him is quite unkind but, at times, the truth has a way of fighting against the tide and washing up on shore, there for all to see.
Are there roads in NWA’s offices?
CERTAINLY, to use an over-worn phrase or sentence, this one takes the cake.
One hundred million Jamaica dollars of money earmarked out of the US$400-million of borrowed money in the Jamaica Development Infrastructure Programme (JDIP) ends up paying for refurbishment of the National Works Agency’s (NWA’s) offices!
I think it was fair to say that once that US$400 million arrived in the Government’s coffers, everyone wanted to be a government minister, or at least, linked to the works ministry.
How could there be that level of expenditure and Minister Mike Henry claims ignorance of it? Is the spending on steroids?
The auditor general has painted a picture that is very unflattering of the works ministry. I am anxiously awaiting the response from Minister Henry.
What possible explanation can he give?
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