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TO a man involved in the daily grind of meeting the economic needs of his family and himself, no desire is dearer to his heart than the safety and security of his household.His wife wants to know that she can walk to the corner shop or drive to the supermarket, purchase goods and services and do so with the certain assurance that she will not be raped and murdered. The man and his wife both have a need to know that their children will return home safe and sound and un-traumatised by the dysfunctions of crime-prone society.
DUDUS… it was his success at criminality that funded the welfare state in West Kingston
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All in the household want to sit around the TV set on Saturdays and not feel threatened by the likelihood of armed marauders kicking in their doors, pillaging their living space and pumping bullets into their bodies.
In Dudus's plea for leniency, like any man locked away in a cage, his powers of reasoning are confined to words and actions that he believes will lessen the period of his incarceration. That any rational person will understand. In placing items of his past 'benevolence' before the sentencing judge, it is more than implied that he provided a high level of security and welfare to the residents of his community, a security and welfare denied to huge numbers of law-abiding citizens in this country who resided outside Tivoli Gardens and who had no other choice to actually work for a living.
While I would never expect Dudus to itemise his evils to the judge, many of us cannot escape coming to the conclusion that it was his success at criminality that funded the welfare state in West Kingston and that an integral part of that success was his ability to export pain to all other areas outside the political garrison.
He needed to have atoned for his last misdeed in that plea — his allowing his hapless flock like religious sheep genuflecting before the wolf, to barricade the Tivoli Gardens community and attract the unwanted attention of armed, determined and scared soldiers of the state.
Like a religious man promising that he would be taken up in a cloud, his actions resulted in many of his flock committing suicide by inviting the ferocity of state soldiers to kill, at the very least, over 70 members of the community — gunmen and innocents.
That matter was conveniently absent from his plea, but, as I implied before, incarceration limits a man's options at rational thought and brings his focus to only one intention — that of encouraging his early release.
The consternation as expressed by his lawyers that those who say Dudus will 'sing' are bringing danger to his family, is overkill. It is, however, what lawyers do; divorce themselves from the realities of the wider society in defence of their clients, sheep, wolves and the well-heeled. In other words, lawyers are paid to reside on Jupiter while the rest of us must pay for space here on Earth.
My friend, a Jamaican lawyer practising in New York, e-mailed me the following last Wednesday: 'I see that Mr Coke has made the headlines again and his attorney is asserting that he did not "sing". Interesting, as you and I debated this a couple of weeks ago. I do not know if he has "sung" to date, but he will, no matter what his learned counsel asserts, before sentencing.'
My friend Lloyd D'Aguilar also e-mailed me on the events in Tivoli Gardens in May 2010. He said... 'Mark, I still have your last column on the subject on my mind, and I implore you to reread it because your dismissive arguments were too subjective. Whenever you are ready I will introduce you to people in Tivoli and I will show you statements to make you think not about the so-called firefight (I'm not saying none of that didn't take place, but nothing the security forces couldn't handle) but the house-to-house searches and execution of young men they found in those houses. That was criminality and those who orchestrated and commanded it should be punished. The International Criminal Court calls it "crimes against humanity".'
My social activist friend Lloyd is the type of Marxist still waiting for the revolution. As for me, I am very wary of activists who preach social development on behalf of a people who have chosen to live and eat off the plate of criminality for extended periods. Social development for whom? For the people or to meet the objectives of a faded thesis?
The point I have made to Lloyd is that too many people in Tivoli Gardens and many of the other 'enforced' PNP garrisons have been psychologically conditioned to criminality until they believed that it was an entitlement, like free light, free living, free water. I have also made the point that in those areas, the truth rarely ever comes out.
The greatest good that could come out of Tivoli Gardens now is for the people to condemn criminality en masse. The argument against that happening is that we usually have two truths surfacing. PNP truth and JLP truth. And never the two shall meet.
For many years, the political representatives made out Tivoli Gardens to be a bastion of peace. No robberies, rapes, break-ins. Of course, by now we know the reason for that. Should we use that template for the wider society?
Let us give each 'community leader' the opportunity to involve themselves in the trade in illicit drugs and gun-running. Let us facilitate their contacts with South American drug producers. Let us allow then unimpeded access to dirty money, say about $300 million per month per community.
Let us allow them to purchase the loyalties of entire communities and to institute their brutal but effective justice system. Let us allow the community leaders the pick of the schoolgirls in the community, above the protestations of their mothers.
After all of that, search hard, harder, and the more you do, the more the truth eludes you. Right overlaps wrong so often that after a while neither really matters. Everything is everything and Orwell lives.
JEEP — Stimulus, crash programme or just another political promise?
Acronyms tend to have instant impact like JEEP (Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme), but in the hands of a politician the belief is that the acronym is written out first, words to fit inside of it are crafted second, and last, the meat of what the whole actually means tends to have a difficulty being explained by the very politicians involved.
Last Sunday, the PNP had a field day. The National Arena was jam-packed by the party faithful and those whose first purpose in life is attachment to a political party — in this case, the PNP.
Struggling to define itself beyond just criticising everything the JLP has done, party president Portia Simpson introduced JEEP, an updated 1970s Impact Work Programme that was known as Crash Programme when it operated.
Workers at the bottom of society, especially women, were given brooms and cutting implements and paid about $26.50 per week, about $10 more than what a household helper was earning then. The idea was for them to keep the public spaces clean. The reality spoke differently.
It was highly politicised, filled with corruption (some PNP thugs had many names and collected many multiples of $26.50 each week) and after a while the workers simply cooked, ate, slept and did little work. It was money well spent politically and it shored up the PNP's base.
While it had some social value because it created 'work' for the least employable in the society, there was little pretence at supervision and hardly any real work was done. In the end, the country paid for assisting the PNP to fund its base.
Failure to explain JEEP
Early last week, the experienced chairman of the PNP, the affable Bobby Pickersgill, was on a radio programme struggling to explain JEEP. Even my PNP friends at street level were more realistic. 'Den if Bruce promise jobs, jobs, jobs, why Portia can't promise JEEP?'
As the debate increased, explanation of details of the programme eluded the PNP. As Pickersgill tried to walk through the rain without getting wet, he said craftily, when pressed for details, 'I don't want to steal the party leader's thunder. She will explain it at an appropriate time.'
On Tuesday, one of the academics in the PNP called me and suggested that the only reason why the JLP was pressing the PNP for details was to plagiarise the plan, that is, copy it and use it to the JLP's benefit.
The reality of our politics dawned on me then. Let us assume that the PNP has a real plan in JEEP — short, medium and long-term even though it cannot identify the funding sources. Let us assume also that the idea for it arose a day or two before the PNP conference. The implication in what my PNP friend said is that although we (the PNP) believe the plan is workable and if laid out, it can help Jamaica, we need it to get us in power, not to assist a JLP policy to assist the country.
Frankly, after listening to Senator Mark Golding trying his best to explain JEEP on Cliff Hughes' Impact last Thursday evening, I was convinced that there was no real JEEP. It was all designed for the party leader's speech simply because she couldn't go to the party's 73rd annual conference to rehash Dudus and Manatt. She needed content, so she wished on a star and the fairy godmother waved her wand and a JEEP appeared.
When Bruce Golding promised jobs, jobs, jobs, although I believe it was standard political fluff for all opposition parties universally, in the best of times, it takes at least two years into a second term to realise any such large job creation programme.
Crash programmes are outdated
In Jamaica's case, there are hundreds of thousands of our fellow Jamaicans who are undereducated, uncertified, untrained and employable only in the most menial of situations. Even if JEEP were actually a real plan, its short-term component — though catchy to the gullible, needy voter — would be economically troubling, especially considering the realities of the world's economy.
If a society has not reached to a certain optimum level of output, any attempt to introduce non-productive, make-work (bullo-wok) programmes will only result in the lowering of total output. The problem with the PNP is that its leader is still trying to recapture the ghost of Michael Manley in the 1970s when he captured us with his democratic socialist distributionist ideas and programmes.
The world has changed radically since that time.
It is obvious that under an IMF agreement there will be no wiggle room to indulge in the sort of quick vote-catching gimmickry that the opposition leader promised. Frankly, I believe the matter demands parliamentary debate not simply, as the JLP hopes, to embarrass the PNP, but to flesh out any substance that may be in it.
If there is substance in it that the JLP can utilise, the PNP does not want that to happen, because a political party's first objective is not the development of the country and its people. It is the attainment and the maintenance of state power. Let the people be damned!
The idea of a stimulus, that is, putting people to work to stimulate a demand for the production of goods and services, is a sound one. Political experimentation based on empty political promises and a hangover of the propensity to redistribute rather than create wealth is not something that any government can afford in these economically tough times.
The PNP, however, needed a message last Sunday and it created a JEEP that seemingly cannot leave the showroom.
The reality is that any sort of stimulus has to be based on infrastructural development and it has to be adequately funded. The PNP has created JEEP in its mind, but the kindest I can say of it is that it has no wheels.
Old socialists never change, they only stay around long enough to rehash the outdated. The sad fact is that there are people whose employment prospects are worsening as the world changes. It is the PNP who spent 18 1/2 years at the bat who should be now championing the 'new Jamaican' that was brought into the full realisation of his potential (education, skills training, etc) that would allow him to partake in any new FDI start-ups that are likely to come in.
In the interim, the Government needs to come clean on what has been taking place with the IMF. It also needs to roll out the JDIP, fix the roads and allow our road users easier passage. Not only will the JDIP be a stimulus, but increased ease of passage on our roadways also has stimulus components.
One wishes to see less politics from the ruling JLP and more solid work. From the PNP we expect what is expected from all opposition parties — easy answers to all the troubling problems.
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...#ixzz1YyAMdZec