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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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BioSketch
John Maxwell of the University of the
West Indies (UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999
single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican government's efforts to
build houses at Hope, the nation's oldest and best known
botanical gardens. His campaigning earned him first prize in the
2000 Sandals Resort's annual Environmental Journalism
Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He is also
the author of How to
Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists and
Journalists. Jamaica, 2000.
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I
suppose that I might consider myself as having been a friend of
Michael Manley, and as I told him, if I was to be his friend, I
had no option but to tell him the truth as I saw it. Of course,
this sometimes created a commotion, because, like most political
leaders, he did not take kindly to being contradicted. But if
you happen to be in the unenviable position of being the friend
of one of these personages, the true test is whether s/he is
willing to listen when you say something they don’t want to
hear.
Mr
Blair, the British Prime Minister, went his own sweet way in the
wake of George Bush, attempting to cement Britain’s 'special
relationship' with the United States by slavishly refusing to
disagree even when it was plain to the rest of the world that Mr
Bush was about to make a fool of himself. So, the western world,
the so-called Free World, was led by two fools instead of one.
The Authorised
Version
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When the mercenaries proved unable to do that
job, the US itself stepped in with its Ambassador and its
Marines making a predawn call on the President to inform him
that if he didn't leave the country his life was worthless. They
put him on a cargo plane and rendered him to Africa.It was not only Aristide and his family who
were taken for a ride. The world was conned by official
propaganda and journalistic pimps, which managed to paint a
picture of the mild-mannered slum priest as a violent, corrupt
demonic oppressor of his people. The US Secretary of State was
reported to have warned Ron Dellums, a former US Congressman, a
friend of Aristide's, to tell the President that he was going to
die and that the US would do nothing to save him. President Bush Feb 29, 2004: "President
Aristide has resigned. He has left his country, The Constitution
of Haiti is working. This government believes it essential that
Haiti have a hopeful future. This is the beginning of a new
chapter in the country’s history."
A Basket to
Carry Water
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As I said on a
television programme a few weeks ago, the only thing Aristide
has not yet been accused of is cannibalism. But that too,
may be in the offing.
Perhaps the
Jamaican government should seek the advice and assistance of Mr
Ira Lowenthal, the head cook and bottlewasher of the Haiti
Democracy Project, who is now stationed in Jamaica, busily
enhancing our democracy. Apparently, Mr Lowenthal, an expert on
voudou, spent years on a USAID mission "enhancing
Haitian democracy”.
He is on a similar
contract in Jamaica. Should we be alarmed?
Building Utopia on a Garbage Heap
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We need to get over
our legalistic, moralistic, humanistic perhaps even socialistic
preoccupation with principle, honour, declarations, treaties,
conventions, and solemn undertakings.
Murderers,
torturers, rapists and other depraved hooligans now walk the
streets of Haiti free, dispensing “justice’ to their enemies
– according to the news agencies. They are, says
Mr La Tortue, not criminals, but 'freedom fighters'. There will
be impunity for the murderers, but for the former President,
character assassination is what he deserves and at the hands of
Colin Powell.
The Circular World of
Colin Powell
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Instead, the Prime Minister
declared forthrightly that she proposed to continue with
the heavy metal development which is now destroying what
is left of Jamaica.
In the first place, as
someone who says she treasures the Jamaican countryside,
Mrs Simpson must know that these developments have never
been properly examined before they were put on track The
government of Jamaica is continuing the trend started by
Mr Patterson in disobeying ,disregarding and ignoring
its own rules.
What is worse is that if as
they say, Mrs Simpson Miller and the PNP are serious
about sustainable development, they do not seem to
understand what that means.
Last week I reported on the
government’s intention to destroy the Cockpit country in
the effort to scrape the last pound of bauxitic earth
from Trelawny. And there are apparently plans to create
some mad theme-park based on the Maroon heritage, no
doubt in carefully packaged, plastic and concrete
monstrosities built on the bones of some of our heroes.
A Week as Long as the Titanic
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Table
My maternal grandfather's bones lie
somewhere underneath the alumina refinery at Nain, safe
at least from the caustic soda and soda ash which
pollutes the air breathed by his neighbour's
descendants, sickens their livestock, and corrodes their
aluminum roofs.
Beginning six decades ago, bauxite
mining companies began to buy up huge areas of land in
Jamaica, in areas where the earth was red, as red as
blood when newly dug. The people from whom they bought
the land were happy.
There was no irrigation in St
Elizabeth, St Ann and Manchester, and the land they sold
was in their opinion, not really good farmland. That was
not true, as my friend Rolly Simms and his neighbours
proved in Mocho, in Clarendon, where they grew huge
crops of vegetables on bauxite land fertilised by
chicken, cow and goat manure – as they still do in parts
of St Elizabeth.
That was before the bauxite companies
came to Mocho in the sixties and their coming was in a
way providential for the farmers there: they had been
bankrupted by the failure of the Marrakech and Arawak
hotels which had bought thousands of pounds of
vegetables from them and went bankrupt without paying.
My Grandfather's Bones
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"Many black people feel that their race,
their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a
factor in the response, I'm
not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have
many poor people without a way out."
A vignette: Two photographs; one from Associated
Press captioned A young man walks through waist deep water after
looting a grocery store the other from Agence france Presse:
Two residents walk through waist deep water after finding bread
and soda from a local grocery store: The AP photo was of a black man.
Professor Krugman suggests that "At a
fundamental level. our current leaders just aren't serious about
some of the essential functions of government. They like waging
war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in
need or spending on preventive measures."
"Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly
fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In
fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude,
now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing
its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
Losing
New Orleans
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We are rightfully dismissive of drug pushers,
bloodsuckers who profit from human weakness, selling their
addict customers crack cocaine and heroin, to stoke a habit
which they first fostered. Like the IMF, pushers are never
satisfied. They always want their customers to consume more of
their product, until it kills them. The IMF pushes money –
loans at usurious interest rates to desperate, poor countries.
In 1978 we thought that, as members of
the IMF, going through a temporary balance of payments
problem caused by international recession and oil price hikes,
we were entitled, as the IMF charter said, to borrow enough to
help us get out of our difficulties. The IMF had other ideas.
Their ‘rescue’ operation carried political and economic
conditionalities, designed from the start, to destroy the
apparatus of democratic government and public participation,
designed to destroy so-called ‘populist politics’ – in
which political leaders respond to the needs and wishes of their
constituents.
About that same time, at a Third World summit
in Havana, Fidel Castro advised the world and the IMF that
the Third World Debt was unpayable, and that continuing the
policies then fashionable would only push poor countries further
towards the brink of disaster. Since then the debt has only
become bigger, more oppressive and more unpayable.
A Scourge
for the Disinherited
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update 16 October 2007
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