[Ppnews] Oliver Twist in Hong Kong

[Political Prisoner News]

Oliver Twist in Hong Kong

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/JM/12_18_5.html
by John Maxwell

On Friday morning, as I write, the Leviathan 
called Globalisation seems headed for the rocks 
in Hong Kong. Stark failure faces the Doha round 
of negotiations for a new world order in which 
imperialist capitalism would adopt a new persona 
- a kinder, gentler face disguising the same old 
rapacious exploitation of the poor of the world.

Among the rocks in Globalisation's seaway are the 
newly awakened giants of the Third World or 
so-called Developing World - India, Brazil and 
others as well as - Surprise! Surprise!! - the 
primary producers of the African, Caribbean and 
Pacific - ACP -former colonies of metropolitan Europe.

Marooned in their miserable alms houses, these 
minor mendicants are saying to the rich masters - "Please, Sir, we want more!"

The masters of the alms houses, the Americans, 
Europeans, Japanese and other members of the 
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and 
Development (OECD) are bemused by these demands, 
not quite understanding what the little beggars 
want when they say they are demanding justice.

Absent from the global forum are the Haitians, 
the people who began the whole process of 
decolonisation and freedom from plantation 
slavery. And that is where the apparently 
intractable quarrel about economic justice began 
between the rich and the poor of the world.

The Haitian revolution began a 200 year long 
process of decolonisation which is ending, as it 
began, with the Haitians struggling to free 
themselves from slavery. They were not defeated 
by force of arms but by compound interest; to 
escape the French and American trade embargo of 
their newly independent country, the Haitians 
agreed to pay the French reparations for their 
war of Independence In neighbouring Jamaica, the 
planters were recompensed for losing their property when slavery was abolished.

Nothing was paid to the ex-slaves, guaranteeing, 
as in Haiti, the continuing supremacy of the 
usurers and the shopkeepers. Haiti was the first 
highly indebted poor country, having to pay the 
French a penalty estimated by President Aristide 
to equal US$25,000,000,000 in today's money.

When the Haitians defeated two of Napoleon's 
armies, a British army and the remnants of the 
Spanish army in San Domingue they began a process 
of exporting revolution and freedom, a process 
for which they have never been forgiven. It was 
the Haitians who armed and dispatched Simon 
Bolivar on his final and successful mission to 
free Latin America from Spanish rule. Although 
slavery was not abolished in Brazil and the 
United States for another half century and Cuba 
did not gain its full independence for another 
century and a half, Haiti began the process which 
finally transformed piracy and and the plantation 
economy into the system known today as 
capitalism. The plantation economy is moribund - 
not quite dead - it survives in severely 
truncated form - as a paraplegic and dysfunctional system in the ACP countries.

There, in Jamaica and other places, its 
traditions remain strong: social dysfunctions 
including seasonal unemployment, economic 
emigration, social stratification and the 
stranglehold of elites on primitive economies. In 
these economies political parties which claim to 
represent the masses enjoy the fruits of office 
while the elites enjoy the much richer perquisites of economic power.

In these economies it is the commission agents 
and the shopkeepers who are in power, expressing 
their displeasure with mass movements by 
withdrawing their confidence and their bank 
accounts from time to time to enforce 'fiscal 
discipline' and usurious rates of unearned rent - 
income from 'government paper' issued by the 
representatives of the wealth creators for the 
greater good of the wealth consumers.

Reparative Justice

The helplessness and intellectual bankruptcy of 
the plantation economies is nowhere better 
expressed than in Thursday's speech in Hong Kong 
by Jamaica's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Hon K.D. Knight, Q.C.

According to this newspaper on Friday, Mr Knight 
told the Ministerial meeting of the WTO that the 
deliberations would only be successful "to the 
extent that there was a discernible movement on the development agenda."

This, according to Mr Knight, meant: \x95 The 
promotion of the productive sectors through 
trade; \x95 The sustained development of the 
commodity sector; \x95 Building supply capacity 
and competitiveness and increasing market access 
for developing countries in the areas of exports 
including agriculture, commodities, apparel and 
labour and resource intensive manufactures and services.

Which, being interpreted, means: "Give us a 'bly' 
enabling us to build more free zones, dig bigger 
and more destructive holes in the landscape and 
have enough left over for food stamps".

The argument over Universal Human Rights and 
Justice which began in Haiti 201 years ago is now 
subsumed into a piteous cry for bigger, better, 
kindlier and gentler almshouses.

The Third World are asking, like Bustamante in 
1944 in Jamaica, for a 'lickle more bread and a lickle butter'.

There are some others who are asking for an 
entirely different menu, for what some describe 
as a 'preposterous' demand for reparations, 
compensation for the injuries and injustices of 
the last five centuries. Their argument is that 
just as the Germans had to recompense the Jews 
for the injuries inflicted on them and their 
fellows by Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich, so 
should the Americans, English, Spanish, Dutch, 
Portuguese, Belgians pay for their depredations 
in Africa and the New World. These depredations 
continued after slavery and continue to this day, 
as the Europeans, made rich by their 
exploitation, have maximised and entrenched their 
extortion of wealth by new profit-making systems 
in the form of tariffs, protectionism, quotas and 
most of all, unfair terms of trade and ruinous 
interest rates. These systems in turn, finance a 
wealth distributive system in subsidies and 
social services which keep the metropolitan 
working classes out of political and trade union mischief.

What Mr Knight and his Third World backers want 
is that the rich recognise that we too, have 
domestic constituencies to be mollified. The 
unspoken rider to this argument is -'Hey! food 
stamps are insurance against civil unrest and a 
lot cheaper than an expeditionary force.' 
Meanwhile, the colonial elites, amassing new 
fortunes by the week, don't put their money where 
their mouths are - their funds are in Cayman, 
Nassau, Bermuda, Lichtenstein and Jersey. From 
there, the money which could be invested in 
Jamaican enterprise, becomes part of the immense 
fund of Foreign Direct Investment which is 
channeled by the global casino bosses into China, 
Taiwan and other places whose ministers are never 
tired of echoing the European masters' 
preachments that we are poor because we are poor 
and or shiftless, or socialist, or corrupt or simply stupid.

In the 1970s as part of the many short, sharp 
shocks administered by the International 
Financial Institutions, we were told we could not 
subsidise our farmers or our poor. Subsidies 
distorted the market. Our subsidies instead were 
added to the subsidies paid American 
agro-industry and European farmers. It makes 
sound economic sense to subsidise the millionaire 
Fanjuls in Florida sugar or market colossi like 
Archer Daniels, Monsanto, Chiquita (ex-United Fruit), Boeing and Microsoft.

The British are refusing to give up their 
£8,000,000,000 annual subsidy from Europe and the 
French will fight to the death to retain their 
even larger dole from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.

The electro-convulsive therapy - ECT - of the 
IFIs works no better on countries than it did on 
the mentally ill in 'asylums'. Nor does the 
intellectual and emotional lobotomisation of 
whole generations of political leaders. We now 
have leaders whose mental processes have been 
surgically separated from their cultural roots, 
but out in the grassroots, crazy people still 
speak of socialism and absurd concepts such as 
the greatest good for the greatest number.

Paradoxically, political ECT may yet prove 
beneficial; if only we could persuade the rich 
and powerful to behave as brutally as their perceived self-interest tells them.

Nothing would be better for us than a Cuban style 
embargo, forcing us to think for ourselves, 
forcing us to look to our real resources, in our 
cultures, our imaginations , our ingenuity, our people.

We prattle about agroindustry, forgetting that 
sugar was the original and most deadly of all 
agroindustry. Mr Kinght's prescriptions lead to 
an intellectual, economic and cultural dead end. 
If we were to wake up and realise that if we 
stopped paying extortionate interest - exporting 
barrels of money to Cayman, Bermuda, and similar 
ratholes - we would immediately triple the amount 
at the disposal of the government; we would 
understand that salvation is in our own hands and 
not in the hands of the successors to Enron, or 
the psalm-singers of Microsoft or the cooing 
doves of Citibank, Standard & Poors and the US State Department.

If the people of Jamaica were to understand that 
the Government of Jamaica exports twice as much 
of their own hard-earned money to develop foreign 
capitalism as it spends on developing Jamaica, things would soon change.

And we would not have to repatriate Haitians 
running away from tyranny back to their murderers.

Democracy and Development

The US-written Master Narrative of Cuba is so 
pervasive that most of us find it almost 
impossible to imagine what life could be like in "Communist Cuba" .

There are some fascinating snippets in the news 
about the fates of the people of New Orleans 
which was devastated three months ago by 
hurricane Katrina. New Orleans, a city of 600,000 
people was devastated because safety precautions 
which were known to be necessary were never 
taken. The levees (dikes) which should have 
prevented most of the storm surge failed and 
thousands of people were left homeless and 
jobless. The dikes should have been strengthened years ago.

Further, the emergency management systems failed, 
mostly because of incompetence and malign 
neglect. The result is that most of the hurricane 
refugees are still scattered to the four winds, 
some as far away as Alaska and the culture of the 
most cosmopolitan city in the US has been scattered with them.

One harrowing story in the New York Times ( NYT 
Dec 8) tells of Tracy Jackson and Jerel Brown and 
their four young children who " share a twin bed 
and thin mattress on the floor [in] the 14th 
place they have laid their heads since Hurricane 
Katrina struck just over 14 weeks ago."

As the NYT says :"The immediate aftermath of the 
hurricane exposed the deep divide between New 
Orleans's haves and have-nots, as middle-class 
families rushed to hotels while the poorest of 
the poor suffered in the squalor of the 
Superdome. "The chasm remains, more than three 
months later....the Jackson-Browns, who are not 
married and lack high school diplomas, credit 
cards, even driver's licenses, are among the 
legions of desperately destitute still lost and in limbo"

Three days later the NYT said in an editorial: 
"We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is 
a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one 
is willing to move back or honest paralysis over 
difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a 
major American city will die, leaving nothing but 
a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

"We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush 
said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson 
Square and said, "There is no way to imagine 
America without New Orleans." But it has been 
over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck 
and the city is in complete shambles."(NYT Dec. 11)

If a civilisation is to be judged by the care it 
takes of its most helpless,it may be instructive 
to compare the situation in Cuba. Although Cuba 
has been visited by many more and more violent 
hurricanes than the US, fewer than two dozen 
Cubans have been lost to hurricanes in the last five years.

In Cuba the entire country is organised to 
protect and preserve life and community. The 
neighborhood Committees for the Defence of the 
Revolution (CDR) are in fact organisations for 
community preservation. Every Cuban knows what to 
do and where to go and the CDRs make sure that no 
one is left behind, neither man, woman, child, or domestic pet or farm animal.

Cuba is even poorer than Jamaica in the IFIs' 
economic estimation. That the Cubans can do 
better than the United States at protecting their 
people is an amazing and perhaps incendiary fact.

As you can see, I have refrained from commenting 
on these facts. Nevertheless, I am certain that 
merely revealing them is likely to cause me no end of trouble.

Copyright ©2005 John Maxwell


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