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A revolution of conscience (3)
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, April 01, 2007
You may be puzzled by the title of this column - 'A Revolution of Conscience (3)" - because you are unlikely to know that I've written at least two previous articles with the same title, the first one in 1964 or 65.
John Maxwell
Ordinarily, revolution is defined as the violent overthrow of a system of government by its subjects, or in Marxist theory, the inevitable violent transition from one system of production in society to the next. According to Marx, the struggle of the revolution to be born is the basis of the class struggle, and since nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come, and no one so stubborn as the beneficiaries of the old system, the struggle must be violent and end with the unconditional surrender of the ancien régime.
Marx holds that people and classes who own and exercise power do not surrender that power peacefully, which is the reason for the violence of revolution, and so far, history has not proved him wrong.
'Peaceful revolution' is generally considered to be an oxymoron - the forced mating of two antipathetic concepts. But since I am, unlike most people, against the shedding of anyone's blood, I believe it is possible that there are others who believe that surrendering and gaining power may be possible by non-violent means. Perhaps, in Jamaica, we should consider that the revolutionary bloodletting may well be already symbolised by the infraclass violence which has taken the lives of nearly 20,000 people over the last 20 years.
All of this is provoked by the response to my last column which appeared to reveal that my utopian idealism may be more common and perhaps more powerful than anyone has thought.
I am writing this half-a-week before the prime minister's scheduled national broadcast, and a day after several signs that some parts of the world may be moving towards common sense faster than I had imagined.
Within the past week there have been three developments I consider significant, two of them abroad and one in Jamaica.
On Thursday, the United Nations officially endorsed circumcision as an effective means of controlling the spread of HIV/AIDS, which has literally decimated some populations in Africa and threatens to do the same all over the developing world. It is predicted to cost Jamaica six per cent of our GDP.
The UN/WHO decision is belated, since it has been known for more than 10 years that circumcision could save millions of lives and container loads of misery and grief. As a story in the San Francisco Chronicle notes: "Advocates have been urging the World Health Organisation and other international agencies to endorse the procedure for more than a decade."
Circumcision is the surgical removal of the foreskin covering the tip of the penis. The thin layer of skin is rich in the white blood cells targeted by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Studies in Africa have demonstrated that in nations where circumcision is part of the culture, the prevalence of HIV is much lower than in those parts where circumcision is not the norm.
Since this knowledge has been around since the pandemic was in its embryonic stages, I have never been able to understand why the powers that be have not made the promotion of circumcision a major part of their campaigns, preferring instead to preach to people about abstinence, safe sex and clean needles for injecting drugs.
The empirical evidence in favour of circumcision has been around for thousands of years, since the days of Babylon, Phaoronic Egypt and when Moses led the Israelites through the wilderness of Zin (Sinai). It may also have been noted that women whose men were circumcised tended to live longer - because they were less likely to develop cancer of the cervix, vectored by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV).
Perhaps it has taken so long because of the relative powerlessness of women in modern societies.
Circumcision is as effective as a vaccine would be in containing HIV/AIDS. Vaccines to prevent sexually transmitted diseases are abhorred by religious groups in the USA because making sex less lethal, they believe, contributes to promiscuity - a fate worse than death.
That is the reason some groups are opposing the vaccinating of preteen children against HPV: it will license them to go out and fornicate in the streets, presumably, knowing they are safe from cervical cancer.
There is no such excuse, however, for the failure of the American authorities to release a vaccine developed against HIV nearly a decade ago. That vaccine is still unreleased, because in clinical trials it proved less effective against HIV in white and Hispanic people than it did against HIV in blacks. Since it was effective in blacks, whose infection rate is 10 times that of whites in the US, why not license the vaccine for use in back populations - while the search continues for vaccines for other groups? Of course, the differential effect of the vaccine may be just the argument needed by those who believe that HIV was designed by humans beings.
Globalisation is Slavery
Professor Alan Blinder, former member of Bill Clinton's Presidential Council of Economic Advisers, former vice chair of the Federal Reserve System and professor of economics at Princeton, said a few years ago: "Like 99 per cent of economists since the days of Adam Smith, I am a free-trader down to my toes." He is still a free-trader, but now with reservations.
According to Blinder, free trade will have even more disastrous effects on the United States' society and economy than it has had so far. That is, unless the federal government steps in to subsidise education and unemployment insurance and, most important, deliver new subsidies to capitalists so that they can create the kinds of jobs that cannot be outsourced.
According to Blinder, as many as 40 million Americans will lose their jobs to outsourcing in the next 20 years.
History demonstrates, he says, that exported jobs have so far been mainly in manufacturing. He predicts that the next wave of unemployment in the US will come from the electronic delivery of imported services, including computer programming, manuscript editing, science, accounting, language translation and interpretation, and will be bad for mathematicians, economists and financial analysts.
When the globalisers/freetraders speak of free markets they are perpetuating a gigantic fraud. The free market cannot be free if an essential component, labour, is denied the freedom to seek its best opportunities. If that were not the case, the US would simply import labour (as in agriculture), and let the unemployed fall where they may. But this solution is unacceptable for one reason - the political resistance of the American worker to the unemployment created by importing millions of visibly foreign workers.
The real reason for free trade and globalisation is clear: it is the search for slave labour and the protection of the capitalist bottom line. As George Soros has said, the market is a self-fulfilling mechanism for the further enrichment of the rich. As one of the richest people in the world, he may be presumed to know what he is talking about.
Free trade and globalisation mean, as some of us have been saying for years, the destruction of 'inferior' economies and societies and the creation of stateless capitalist Goliaths, temporarily housed in whatever pirate's haven is available, from the Cayman Islands to Liechtenstein, from the Isle of Man to Bermuda. What we will have left is the paradigmatic "Bell Curve" society, in which financiers, living in gated and fortified communities, own and control pullulating millions of hapless Untermenschen whose political independence is a myth, as in Haiti at this moment.
In this cannibalistic version of the 17th century buccaneer/slave societies, there will be no accountability of any kind. The real markets will, as Blinder says, be in services, but SUCH services! The really rich will be able to purchase, legally, not only sexual satisfaction but sexual regeneration, with thriving markets in little boys and girls as well as in human organs, embryos, wombs and whatever people who "have everything" think they need and must have.
These markets will not be the subject of US State Department reports on Human Rights; they will be part of the futures indexes on commodity exchanges worldwide. Liberty will belong, as 'Freedom" does now, to those who own it.
Economic Growth in Jamaica
Many Jamaicans believe that the rest of the world is leaving us behind. No such thing. The whole world suffers from the same malaise, only in varying levels of misery.
In rich societies, eminent economists can disingenuously call for the state to subsidise free trade as long as no one perceives that it is the poor who will be paying for their own enslavement.
So, it was good to read on Thursday morning that there may be some hope for Jamaica. At the latest in the regular Observer Chairman's luncheons hosted by 'Butch' Stewart, proprietor of this newspaper, Jamaican businessmen seemed to agree that education may be a key to Jamaica's development. Financial analyst Dennis Chung said that the Government needed to pay more attention to education and crime than to cricket.
Michael Ammar, a big retailer, agreed with Chung, while the CEO of Digicel, David Hall - although agreeing with the first two that education is "paramount to everything" - said the "reality was that the Government does not have the funds to address such issues".
According to the report in the Observer, Hall said: "Education is paramount to everything and the harsh reality is that if you don't have a society that can earn money, crime is an alternative. People can (urge the government) to put money into this, put money into that, etc, but the reality is that if you look at economies that have been in trouble for the past 30 years, what you have is countries that don't have access to funds like that."
The problem here is that Hall is looking at our economic situation as if it were ordained by God. The fact that we don't have the funds to address these matters is a matter of choice, not of predestination. We are planning to spend many millions more on the second phase of the Doomsday Highway for reasons which largely escape me and most other Jamaicans. It is a matter of choice that this money is not spent on education. It is a matter of choice that we spent so much on cricket and that all these funds will have to be repaid by ordinary Jamaicans.
It is a matter of choice that Jamaica effectively has a flat income tax, which means that the poor pay proportionately much more per capita than the rich, to maintain the society.
Money facilitates the creation of jobs, it cannot create them, and whether one believes in the trickle-down theory of development, as Alan Blinder does, it should be clear from experience in the USA between 1933 and 1970 and in Jamaica between 1955 and 1962, that what pays dividends is the investment in human capital and in the promotion of food security.
It cannot make sense that since 1970 the average real wages of Americans has been stagnant and in Jamaica has been dropping. In the meantime, the wealthiest in both societies have prospered as never before, and crime and violence have increased exponentially.
I have often in the past quoted from World Bank studies to the point that investment in education can by itself reduce violent crime and increase GDP, and that taking care of the poor can achieve similar gains. As John F Kennedy said, a society which does not take care of the many who are poor cannot save the few who are rich.
I am pretty sure that Butch Stewart - whom I have known since he was in college - shares the same sentiments, which is why he holds these luncheons, to try to get people to think and talk outside of their boxes. I believe he would do this society a great good by inviting some of the World Bank social experts to a few of his luncheons so that they could present their facts and their figures to the movers and shakers in this society.
And I also believe that it would be in the interest of all of us were the prime minister to do the same. We have been inviting all sorts of financial sorcerers and soothsayers to Jamaica for ages past - the Grassls, the Hankes and the Sachses - and they have sold us medicine which does not work as advertised.
Perhaps it is time to hear from the contrarians like Joseph Stiglitz, Kari Levitt and Paul Krugman and from George Soros, who see no sanctity in free markets and try their best to inject common sense into the debate which determines our lives and happiness.
Finally, I must explain to my correspondents that my Internet connections remain sabotaged, and it is extremely difficult for me to respond to all but the most urgent inquiries. Please, however, keep writing to me. You are educating me.
Copyright©2007 John Maxwell
[email protected]
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, April 01, 2007
You may be puzzled by the title of this column - 'A Revolution of Conscience (3)" - because you are unlikely to know that I've written at least two previous articles with the same title, the first one in 1964 or 65.
John Maxwell
Ordinarily, revolution is defined as the violent overthrow of a system of government by its subjects, or in Marxist theory, the inevitable violent transition from one system of production in society to the next. According to Marx, the struggle of the revolution to be born is the basis of the class struggle, and since nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come, and no one so stubborn as the beneficiaries of the old system, the struggle must be violent and end with the unconditional surrender of the ancien régime.
Marx holds that people and classes who own and exercise power do not surrender that power peacefully, which is the reason for the violence of revolution, and so far, history has not proved him wrong.
'Peaceful revolution' is generally considered to be an oxymoron - the forced mating of two antipathetic concepts. But since I am, unlike most people, against the shedding of anyone's blood, I believe it is possible that there are others who believe that surrendering and gaining power may be possible by non-violent means. Perhaps, in Jamaica, we should consider that the revolutionary bloodletting may well be already symbolised by the infraclass violence which has taken the lives of nearly 20,000 people over the last 20 years.
All of this is provoked by the response to my last column which appeared to reveal that my utopian idealism may be more common and perhaps more powerful than anyone has thought.
I am writing this half-a-week before the prime minister's scheduled national broadcast, and a day after several signs that some parts of the world may be moving towards common sense faster than I had imagined.
Within the past week there have been three developments I consider significant, two of them abroad and one in Jamaica.
On Thursday, the United Nations officially endorsed circumcision as an effective means of controlling the spread of HIV/AIDS, which has literally decimated some populations in Africa and threatens to do the same all over the developing world. It is predicted to cost Jamaica six per cent of our GDP.
The UN/WHO decision is belated, since it has been known for more than 10 years that circumcision could save millions of lives and container loads of misery and grief. As a story in the San Francisco Chronicle notes: "Advocates have been urging the World Health Organisation and other international agencies to endorse the procedure for more than a decade."
Circumcision is the surgical removal of the foreskin covering the tip of the penis. The thin layer of skin is rich in the white blood cells targeted by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Studies in Africa have demonstrated that in nations where circumcision is part of the culture, the prevalence of HIV is much lower than in those parts where circumcision is not the norm.
Since this knowledge has been around since the pandemic was in its embryonic stages, I have never been able to understand why the powers that be have not made the promotion of circumcision a major part of their campaigns, preferring instead to preach to people about abstinence, safe sex and clean needles for injecting drugs.
The empirical evidence in favour of circumcision has been around for thousands of years, since the days of Babylon, Phaoronic Egypt and when Moses led the Israelites through the wilderness of Zin (Sinai). It may also have been noted that women whose men were circumcised tended to live longer - because they were less likely to develop cancer of the cervix, vectored by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV).
Perhaps it has taken so long because of the relative powerlessness of women in modern societies.
Circumcision is as effective as a vaccine would be in containing HIV/AIDS. Vaccines to prevent sexually transmitted diseases are abhorred by religious groups in the USA because making sex less lethal, they believe, contributes to promiscuity - a fate worse than death.
That is the reason some groups are opposing the vaccinating of preteen children against HPV: it will license them to go out and fornicate in the streets, presumably, knowing they are safe from cervical cancer.
There is no such excuse, however, for the failure of the American authorities to release a vaccine developed against HIV nearly a decade ago. That vaccine is still unreleased, because in clinical trials it proved less effective against HIV in white and Hispanic people than it did against HIV in blacks. Since it was effective in blacks, whose infection rate is 10 times that of whites in the US, why not license the vaccine for use in back populations - while the search continues for vaccines for other groups? Of course, the differential effect of the vaccine may be just the argument needed by those who believe that HIV was designed by humans beings.
Globalisation is Slavery
Professor Alan Blinder, former member of Bill Clinton's Presidential Council of Economic Advisers, former vice chair of the Federal Reserve System and professor of economics at Princeton, said a few years ago: "Like 99 per cent of economists since the days of Adam Smith, I am a free-trader down to my toes." He is still a free-trader, but now with reservations.
According to Blinder, free trade will have even more disastrous effects on the United States' society and economy than it has had so far. That is, unless the federal government steps in to subsidise education and unemployment insurance and, most important, deliver new subsidies to capitalists so that they can create the kinds of jobs that cannot be outsourced.
According to Blinder, as many as 40 million Americans will lose their jobs to outsourcing in the next 20 years.
History demonstrates, he says, that exported jobs have so far been mainly in manufacturing. He predicts that the next wave of unemployment in the US will come from the electronic delivery of imported services, including computer programming, manuscript editing, science, accounting, language translation and interpretation, and will be bad for mathematicians, economists and financial analysts.
When the globalisers/freetraders speak of free markets they are perpetuating a gigantic fraud. The free market cannot be free if an essential component, labour, is denied the freedom to seek its best opportunities. If that were not the case, the US would simply import labour (as in agriculture), and let the unemployed fall where they may. But this solution is unacceptable for one reason - the political resistance of the American worker to the unemployment created by importing millions of visibly foreign workers.
The real reason for free trade and globalisation is clear: it is the search for slave labour and the protection of the capitalist bottom line. As George Soros has said, the market is a self-fulfilling mechanism for the further enrichment of the rich. As one of the richest people in the world, he may be presumed to know what he is talking about.
Free trade and globalisation mean, as some of us have been saying for years, the destruction of 'inferior' economies and societies and the creation of stateless capitalist Goliaths, temporarily housed in whatever pirate's haven is available, from the Cayman Islands to Liechtenstein, from the Isle of Man to Bermuda. What we will have left is the paradigmatic "Bell Curve" society, in which financiers, living in gated and fortified communities, own and control pullulating millions of hapless Untermenschen whose political independence is a myth, as in Haiti at this moment.
In this cannibalistic version of the 17th century buccaneer/slave societies, there will be no accountability of any kind. The real markets will, as Blinder says, be in services, but SUCH services! The really rich will be able to purchase, legally, not only sexual satisfaction but sexual regeneration, with thriving markets in little boys and girls as well as in human organs, embryos, wombs and whatever people who "have everything" think they need and must have.
These markets will not be the subject of US State Department reports on Human Rights; they will be part of the futures indexes on commodity exchanges worldwide. Liberty will belong, as 'Freedom" does now, to those who own it.
Economic Growth in Jamaica
Many Jamaicans believe that the rest of the world is leaving us behind. No such thing. The whole world suffers from the same malaise, only in varying levels of misery.
In rich societies, eminent economists can disingenuously call for the state to subsidise free trade as long as no one perceives that it is the poor who will be paying for their own enslavement.
So, it was good to read on Thursday morning that there may be some hope for Jamaica. At the latest in the regular Observer Chairman's luncheons hosted by 'Butch' Stewart, proprietor of this newspaper, Jamaican businessmen seemed to agree that education may be a key to Jamaica's development. Financial analyst Dennis Chung said that the Government needed to pay more attention to education and crime than to cricket.
Michael Ammar, a big retailer, agreed with Chung, while the CEO of Digicel, David Hall - although agreeing with the first two that education is "paramount to everything" - said the "reality was that the Government does not have the funds to address such issues".
According to the report in the Observer, Hall said: "Education is paramount to everything and the harsh reality is that if you don't have a society that can earn money, crime is an alternative. People can (urge the government) to put money into this, put money into that, etc, but the reality is that if you look at economies that have been in trouble for the past 30 years, what you have is countries that don't have access to funds like that."
The problem here is that Hall is looking at our economic situation as if it were ordained by God. The fact that we don't have the funds to address these matters is a matter of choice, not of predestination. We are planning to spend many millions more on the second phase of the Doomsday Highway for reasons which largely escape me and most other Jamaicans. It is a matter of choice that this money is not spent on education. It is a matter of choice that we spent so much on cricket and that all these funds will have to be repaid by ordinary Jamaicans.
It is a matter of choice that Jamaica effectively has a flat income tax, which means that the poor pay proportionately much more per capita than the rich, to maintain the society.
Money facilitates the creation of jobs, it cannot create them, and whether one believes in the trickle-down theory of development, as Alan Blinder does, it should be clear from experience in the USA between 1933 and 1970 and in Jamaica between 1955 and 1962, that what pays dividends is the investment in human capital and in the promotion of food security.
It cannot make sense that since 1970 the average real wages of Americans has been stagnant and in Jamaica has been dropping. In the meantime, the wealthiest in both societies have prospered as never before, and crime and violence have increased exponentially.
I have often in the past quoted from World Bank studies to the point that investment in education can by itself reduce violent crime and increase GDP, and that taking care of the poor can achieve similar gains. As John F Kennedy said, a society which does not take care of the many who are poor cannot save the few who are rich.
I am pretty sure that Butch Stewart - whom I have known since he was in college - shares the same sentiments, which is why he holds these luncheons, to try to get people to think and talk outside of their boxes. I believe he would do this society a great good by inviting some of the World Bank social experts to a few of his luncheons so that they could present their facts and their figures to the movers and shakers in this society.
And I also believe that it would be in the interest of all of us were the prime minister to do the same. We have been inviting all sorts of financial sorcerers and soothsayers to Jamaica for ages past - the Grassls, the Hankes and the Sachses - and they have sold us medicine which does not work as advertised.
Perhaps it is time to hear from the contrarians like Joseph Stiglitz, Kari Levitt and Paul Krugman and from George Soros, who see no sanctity in free markets and try their best to inject common sense into the debate which determines our lives and happiness.
Finally, I must explain to my correspondents that my Internet connections remain sabotaged, and it is extremely difficult for me to respond to all but the most urgent inquiries. Please, however, keep writing to me. You are educating me.
Copyright©2007 John Maxwell
[email protected]
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