Author Archives: Mike

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We Are Not Acting Irresponsibly Says PNP.?

The Ruling Jamaica Labor par­ty Administration has accused the Opposition People’s National Party of being irre­spon­si­ble in its demand for trans­paren­cy in the arrange­ments sur­round­ing the International Monetary Fund and the Jamaica Developement Infrastructure Programme.

Here’s the report from the Jamaica Observer:

THE Opposition People’s National Party is main­tain­ing that it is not act­ing ‘irre­spon­si­bly’ in its quest to get answers from the Government on the state of its arrange­ment with the International Monetary Fund and the Jamaica Development Infrastructure Programme.

Responding to claims by Finance Minister Audley Shaw that the par­ty had employed a ‘win-at-all-cost’ approach and was try­ing to “cause investors to lose con­fi­dence in Jamaica”, the PNP said it would not be deterred in press­ing for “truth­ful answers”.

“The ques­tions, which have been posed by mem­bers of the Opposition, are valid and deserve direct, straight­for­ward respons­es, unless there is a delib­er­ate plan by the admin­is­tra­tion to con­ceal the facts from the pub­lic,” par­ty chair­man Robert Pickersgill said in a state­ment yesterday.

“We will con­tin­ue to press for truth­ful answers to our ques­tions so that the coun­try can have the facts laid bare for all to see. Only then will it be pos­si­ble for the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers to engage in an informed debate on these vital issues,” Pickersgill added​.Read more: http://​www​.jamaicaob​serv​er​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​W​e​-​a​r​e​-​n​o​t​-​a​c​t​i​n​g​-​i​r​ree

I am of the belief that this is a red her­ring by Minister Shaw and the Administration , the PNP which is in oppo­si­tion has every right to the infor­ma­tion it is demand­ing on behalf of the Jamaican peo­ple. What I find dis­con­cert­ing is that there would be any attempt at obfus­ca­tion and deceit in these projects, .

I am puz­zled as to how any major project could be under­tak­en in the coun­try that is not open infor­ma­tion to the oppo­si­tion and the pub­lic. The Government is not a monar­chy and can­not rule by decree, in a democ­ra­cy a gov­ern­ment rule by con­sent. It is about time that our coun­try have appro­pri­ate laws that makes these issues go away, before expen­di­tures are under­tak­en the house must vote on such expen­di­tures, in effect all aspects of that expen­di­ture must be avail­able to all deci­sion makers .

News flash to Shaw , Investors had long lost con­fi­dence in Jamaica as a legit­i­mate or prop­er cli­mate in which to do bussiness.

Run-away crime.Run-away Inflation.Run-away secu­ri­ty costs.Run-away ener­gy cost.Run-away beau­re­cra­cy.Run-away cor­rup­tion.Run-away reg­u­la­tions.Run-away Governmental bungling.Run-away work­er in dis­ci­pline.Run-away union involv­ment and pow­er. Yes Minister Shaw Serious Investors had long writ­ten off Jamaica as a place to do busi­ness, just look around , all the com­pa­nies have left. Minister Shaw in his crit­i­cism of the Opposition on this issue, whether true or not , has opened him­self and the Administration up to claims they have some­thing to hide>There are numer­ous instances of irre­spon­si­ble behav­iour by the PNP .Finsac, Cuban light bulb scan­dal, not vot­ing to extend the state of emer­gency, not vot­ing to allow the Police to hold crim­i­nal sus­pects for longer peri­ods with­out charge , the list is long and unbe­liev­able from an enti­ty pur­port­ing to want to lead, there is much I am ashamed of for that par­ty , even though I sup­port nei­ther par­ty.This is not one of them.

mike beck­les:

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WAS INDEPENDENCE WORTH IT? Part 3 :


Spurred on by what seem to be a new lev­el of deprav­i­ty in the crim­i­nal under­world , Prime Minister Bruce Golding sug­gest­ed that hang­ing be resumed in Jamaica. The Prime Minister was react­ing to the spate of decap­i­ta­tion that occurred with­in a short peri­od of time. At least two of the vic­tims seemed to have been just ordi­nary Jamaicans whose only trans­gres­sions were that they spoke to mem­bers of the media. The PM whilst mak­ing the sug­ges­tion allud­ed to the debate that was sure to fol­low, I took the lib­er­ty to sug­gest to him in these blogs that there would be howls of con­dem­na­tion from the reg­u­lar quar­ters, rather than a debate.

It is now clear to rea­son­able peo­ple, that irre­spec­tive of the crimes being com­mit­ted ‚there are cer­tain ele­ments in Jamaica that will not be com­fort­able with any form of pun­ish­ment for those crimes. I did use the word “pun­ish­ment” , crim­i­nals should be pun­ished . I am more than a lit­tle pissed at those who lib­er­al­ly argue that what­ev­er course of action soci­ety take regard­ing crim­i­nals, should sole­ly be refor­ma­tive and of reha­bil­i­ta­tion. There must be with­in those frame­works an ele­ment of pun­ish­ment. We should not be in the busi­ness of reward­ing crim­i­nals, reform is reward clothed in a fan­cy package.

The Prime Minister must now decide by his actions , crit­ics be dammed , whether his com­ments were just a knee jerk response to the inci­dents, or he is pre­pared to use his high office to ensure that Jamaica’s laws are upheld. any inac­tion on this sub­ject must now be seen as a con­tin­ued capit­u­la­tion to Carolyn Gomes and Amnesty International, an indi­vid­ual and a for­eign body ‚over the clear and unequiv­o­cal wish­es of the vast major­i­ty of Jamaica’s 2.8 mil­lion people.

The major­i­ty rules in a democ­ra­cy, we pur­port to have a democ­ra­cy , if that be the case the views of the major­i­ty should be respect­ed and adhered to, this is not about some­thing that is yet to leg­is­lat­ed. This is an issue of car­ry­ing out the dic­tates of set­tled law,not capit­u­lat­ing to minor­i­ty views or for­eign Agencies . Agencies that have absolute­ly no pow­er in dic­tat­ing how laws gets enforced with­in their own country.

Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean Islands all, have been occu­pied , and raped by European pow­ers ‚with­in the Caribbean, our African peo­ple who forms the vast major­i­ty of the inhab­i­tants, have ben forced to speak English, French, Dutch,Spanish and even Portugee’s, none of our peo­ple were allowed to con­tin­ue with our moth­er tongues from Africa. Once the occu­piers were done with their pil­lag­ing and dom­i­na­tion they were all too hap­py to cut the apron strings set­ting us adrift ‚as was the case with Jamaica’s sup­posed Independence from England.

There are some in Jamaica that engage in revi­sion­ist his­to­ry, per­pet­u­at­ing the myth that Jamaica had achieved a real coup in gain­ing Independence from England. The truth is,Jamaica was going to be let go whether we want­ed to go or not . England was by then a shell of its for­mer Colonial glo­ry and was in no posi­tion to be patron to an incon­se­quen­tial Island that was not bring­ing noth­ing into the Royal coffers.

My point is, as a result of the fore­gone, Jamaica must embrace its own iden­ti­ty, forge ahead under a new char­ter which must include con­sti­tu­tion­al reform , we are either an inde­pen­dent nation or we are not .

There can be no pledge of alle­giance to our sov­er­eign lady the queen.

I call on the Prime Minister to enforce the laws and let the chips fall where they may , crit­ics be dammed. On this issue the major­i­ty is with you.

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Dow Falls 512 In Steepest Decline Since ’08 Crisis :AP

Gripped by fear of a new reces­sion, the stock mar­ket suf­fered its worst day Thursday since the finan­cial cri­sis in the fall of 2008. The Dow Jones indus­tri­al aver­age fell more than 500 points, its ninth-steep­est decline.The sell-off wiped out the Dow’s remain­ing gains for 2011. It put the Dow and broad­er stock index­es into what investors call a cor­rec­tion — down 10 per­cent from their highs in the spring.“We are con­tin­u­ing to be bom­bard­ed by wor­ries about the glob­al econ­o­my,” said Bill Stone, the chief invest­ment strate­gist for PNC Financial.(AP)

For months the talk­ing heads and pun­dits have been talk­ing of a poten­tial dou­ble dip reces­sion, cable net­works have yapped about the poten­tial for a dou­ble dip. I had not heard the term before the heads on the cable chan­nels kept using it over and over and over , like a bad song until it wakes me out of my sleep, dou­ble dip , dou­ble dip.

I have to con­fess I am not a Harvard MBA , but I believe in self ful­fil­ing proph­esy. The talk­ing heads have final­ly talked us into anoth­er reces­sion. There is admit­ted­ly over a tril­lion dol­lars in sur­plus funds avail­able in the busi­ness sec­tor, that could poten­tial­ly hire a lot of new work­ers , this has not mate­ri­al­ized despite indi­ca­tions that most major cor­po­ra­tions are doing extreme­ly well. Even com­pa­nies like General Motors that recieved a hand up from the President have paid back the major­i­ty of what they were loaned, and are show­ing more than antic­i­pat­ed sur­plus­es in their bal­ance sheets . To GM’s cred­it they have been expand­ing and that means they are hir­ing more Americans.

The Banking sec­tor is slight­ly dif­fer­ent, there is some­thing sin­is­ter going on here , not only are they not lend­ing despite the record prof­its they are rak­ing in , it seem there is a con­cert­ed effort to run out President Obama’s term in office. There is ample evi­dence to sup­port the Administration’s argu­ments that we have seen the worst, yet despite all of those assur­ances, and hav­ing got­ten past the Republican man­u­fac­tured cri­sis of a debt ceil­ing games­man­ship, today there is the mam­moth sell­off of stocks.

Granted this is noth­ing new,and may not be attrib­ut­able to any sin­gle indi­ca­tor , it does gives rea­son for pause and intro­spec­tion. Most major cor­po­ra­tions in this coun­try give mon­ey to both poli­it­i­cal par­ties , with most giv­ing the lion’s share to the repub­li­can party.The President cam­paigned on a plat­form of repeal­ing the Bush tax cuts, he has kept that argu­ment going through­out his pres­i­den­cy thus far. The repub­li­cans on the oth­er hand have stead­fast­ly refused to allow those tax-breaks to be rolled back to the Clinton years.

The rigid refusal of the tea par­ty activists in the house of repre­san­ta­tives has lit­er­al­ly pre­vent­ed any debate for those roll backs to be done , make no mis­take this would result in hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars in the trea­sury over a peri­od of time,this mon­ey would come from peo­ple who do not need the tax breaks and should be asked to share in the sac­ri­fice for the greater good. Republicans have stead­fast­ly refused to allow any debate on the issue of repeal­ing the Bush tax cuts, mak­ing the false argu­ments that there should be no tax­a­tion on any­one in a time of a reces­sion when the econ­o­my needs to grow . This argu­ment has just been turned on it’s head in light of this sell off , the super rich still have their bil­lions, yet they are not hir­ing, and they are actu­al­ly pulling their mon­ey from the market.

The ques­tion is , Is there a con­spir­a­cy to destroy the pres­i­den­cy of Obama irre­spec­tive of the cost to the coun­try ? do not put this past them, many in the bussi­ness sec­tor have pub­licly stat­ed their dis­dain for the pres­i­dent and his poli­cies , poli­cies they char­ac­ter­ize as social­ist. Their under­stand­ing of social­ism is poli­cies that takes care of our sick and indi­gent, the elder­ly and mak­ing sure our chil­dren have schools to attend.

We will watch this and get back to you on this very impor­tant sub­ject, our very exis­tence may very well depend on it.

mike beckles:

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SCRAP METAL SAGA CONTINUES:

The saga involv­ing the scrap met­al trade in Jamaica con­tin­ues , this time with new play­ers get­ting involved . As is cus­tom­ary in Jamaica noth­ing works well, so if a pol­i­cy deci­sion is tak­en that actu­al­ly is the cor­rect one, one can rest assured there will be thun­der­ous howls of con­dem­na­tion from all quar­ters . The lat­est play­er to enter the non- debate is Earl Witter the Public Defender.

Now just for trans­paren­cy, let me declare, I was nev­er a fan of that office, and I am absolute­ly not a fan of Earl Witter the head of that Agency. Let me clar­i­fy my rea­sons for feel­ing this way.

(1) The office of Public Defender is a dupli­ca­tion of Government func­tions , a drain on the mea­gre resources of the State.

Jamaica has a Justice and Attorney General’s Office ‚that Office is des­ig­nat­ed to take care of the inter­est of the Public.

Earl Witter ? well some con­sid­ered him a good Lawyer , not me this Guy was at best a mediocre oper­a­tive , and this comes from watch­ing him in the Court Rooms of the cor­po­rate area for almost a decade.

Witter , not will­ing to be left off the pub­lic­i­ty train, grand­ly announced that his office would be launch­ing a probe of the Ministers actions .

Here’s the sto­ry cour­tesy of the Jamaica Observer:

PUBLIC Defender Earl Witter yes­ter­day described as unfair the Government’s deci­sion to shut down the local scrap met­al trade, and said his office would be embark­ing on a month-long inves­ti­ga­tion to deter­mine whether the ban is jus​ti​fied​.At a press con­fer­ence at his Harbour Street office in Kingston, Witter con­tend­ed that the move had put legit­i­mate deal­ers out-of-pock­et and that find­ings from his probe would be used to help the author­i­ties cor­rect prob­lems being expe­ri­enced in the indus­try.(Jamaica Observer)

I did tell you this Witter was mediocre right ? well here“s the evi­dence from our friend Jamaica’s Public Defender Earl Witter. If Mister Witter has already con­clud­ed that the actions of the Minister of Industry and Commerce is as char­ac­ter­ized, “unfair” why both­er with an enquiry? , The cor­rect thing to do would be to send a let­ter to Minister Tufton , detail­ing his con­tention and affix the sug­ges­tions he sup­pos­ed­ly have, that will fix the prob­lem as he asserts. This would save valu­able tax dol­lars for the peo­ple’s business.

Secondly , how can any per­son hav­ing an under­stand­ing of how Investigations are done, con­clude with any cer­tain­ty ‚that the inves­ti­ga­tions would last for a spe­cif­ic peri­od of time , one month , accord­ing to Witter ? But Witter was­n’t done.

We are inter­est­ed in the hon­est deal­er, gath­er­er, and hon­est exporter who plays by the rules and who may have been, by this act of the min­is­ter, shaft­ed. And we do that because we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to look into this whole busi­ness,” said Witter, adding that van­dals must be infect­ed with a “dis­ease of the mind”.

“A way has to be found to sup­press effec­tive­ly that kind of activ­i­ty, and under our present sys­tem of gov­ern­ment it is the duty of the Government to do that and to put in place the sys­tem which can work the results that we seek,” he said.

Witter said that he had been in dia­logue with mem­bers of the Scrap Metal Federation — which rep­re­sents licensed exporters and deal­ers — and said that the organ­i­sa­tion has decid­ed to seek legal recourse inde­pen­dent­ly. He, nonethe­less, extend­ed his invi­ta­tion to the body, but not­ed that his pri­ma­ry con­cern was with regards to the gatherers.

“We desire to let it be known to any plain and hon­est deal­er who com­plains to this office that by being put out of busi­ness… by this deci­sion tak­en by the hon­ourable min­is­ter, has the right to com­plain to the pub­lic defend­er, who has the right to inves­ti­gate his com­plaint and seek the appro­pri­ate rem­e­dy,” Witter said.

According to Witter, the find­ings of the inves­ti­ga­tion will be sub­mit­ted to the indus­try min­istry with­in weeks.

In the mean­time, Witter said that he will also be inves­ti­gat­ing the process­es employed by the police in the seizure of goods from hawk­ers and ped­dlers in the Corporate Area. According to him, con­fis­cat­ed items are not being appro­pri­ate­ly logged and secured, and thus unlaw­ful­ly end up in the homes of individuals.

“As regards to these per­ish­ables, what we would be seek­ing to find out from the police is, what sys­tems they have enforced regard­ing the des­ti­na­tion. Read more: http://​www​.jamaicaob​serv​er​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​W​i​t​t​e​r​-​t​o​-​p​r​o​b​e​-​l​e​g​i​t​i​m​a​c​y​-​o​f​-​s​c​r​a​p​-​m​e​t​a​l​-​t​r​a​d​e​-​s​h​u​t​d​o​w​n​_​9​3​6​9​6​3​0​#​i​x​z​z​1​U​4​X​9​N​0k6

Not only has Witter con­clud­ed the out­come of the Investigations not yet done, con­clud­ed how long it would take , with­out know­ing the dynam­ics of whats at stake ‚he already has the solu­tion to the prob­lem ‚a prob­lem that is a source of great con­tem­pla­tion for the rest of 2.8 mil­lion peo­ple with­in the country.
This twit Witter, if he is to be tak­en seri­ous, is ask­ing us to believe that his con­tem­plat­ed actions on behalf of scrap met­al gath­er­ers, deal­ers and exporters will be far removed from the actions of min­is­ter Tufton, in call­ing a com­mon sense halt to the trade. The actions of the Minister in this regard was a cor­rect first step in the right direc­tion , one which the major­i­ty of the coun­try applauds, and agrees with.
All of this is lost on Witter who have no under­stand­ing of the con­cept ‚” the greater good” , This lev­el of luna­cy is not conifed or unique to the pub­lic defend­er , it does per­me­ate a vast major­i­ty of the Jamaican psyche.
In a Democracy the well-being of all must be con­sid­ered , how­ev­er the well-being of those who oper­ate at the tri-tiered sys­tem of the scrap met­al trade have seen their inter­ests trumped by the National good. And cor­rect­ly so.
Each and every play­er involved in the scrap met­al trade in Jamaica must have availed him/​herself to the fact that they are involved in an unsus­tain­able indus­try , no dis­re­spect to that indus­try , but it real­ly is not an industry.
The scrap met­al busi­ness is hus­tle that offers those at the low­est end the oppor­tu­ni­ty to scav­enge the prod­uct, pass it on to a col­lec­tor, who pass­es it to the exporter . At nei­ther of the three lev­els is there any con­cern as to where the prod­uct comes from. That is the nature of the trade, all involved are con­ver­sant that it is a finite hus­tle, under­stand­ing that there would be a time when there is no more scrap met­al just lying around.
This means that those at the scav­enger lev­el would turn to steal­ing and rip­ping the Country’s ques­tion­able Infrastructure apart.
As a small busi­ness own­er I can relate to what it must feel like to lose one’s income, par­tic­u­lar­ly if one is an oper­a­tive that plays by the rules. Now I am unaware of what it means to play by the rules in Jamaica , or in any area of dai­ly life, as the lines are so blurred and in some instances non-existent.
Just yes­ter­day I watched a video of a Government Official giv­ing tes­ti­mo­ny in a Parliamentary com­mit­tee regard­ing the acqui­si­tion of lands for the con­struc­tion of new roads. I was stunned to dis­cov­er that there was real­ly no clear path­way , with­out equiv­o­ca­tion, sim­i­lar to the laws the United States has called “Imminent Domain” that estab­lish­es the Governments right to devel­op the coun­try’s infra­struc­ture, pay­ing fair mar­ket val­ue to land own­ers for their prop­er­ty when the greater good is at stake, mean­ing putting in roads, rail lines, etc that ben­e­fits the entire coun­try. The Government Official admit­ted there were instances where con­struc­tion began with­out the com­pen­sa­tion process com­plet­ed. but I digressed.
The Country is hav­ing a hard time adher­ing to tough dra­con­ian mea­sures insti­tut­ed by the inter­na­tion­al Fund , just so it can draw down on funds to ful­fill its oblig­a­tions, funds by the way that comes with huge rates of Interest . There is no mon­ey to hon­or pre-exist­ing wage con­tracts , yet there are numer­ous dupli­ca­tion in sup­posed Government ser­vices. The Office of Public defend­er being one of them.
Rather than strength­en the Office of Justice and Attorney General they Authorities in Jamaica went ahead and cre­at­ed anoth­er Agency that is an addi­tion­al bur­den on the poor taxpayers .
So tax­pay­ers are left with anoth­er Agency to fund and noth­ing to show for it, beyond grand stand­ing , pos­tur­ing, and egomania..I will­post here for your ben­e­fit the infor­ma­tion regard­ing the cre­ation of that Office. Ask your­selves , did this impov­er­ished Country need this Duplication.

The office of Public Defender is a com­mis­sion of the Parliament, estab­lished by statute,

the Public Defender (Interim) Act, 1999

(i) (‘the Act’). It is man­dat­ed to pro­tectt and enforce the rights of “cit­i­zens” (ii) (My empha­sis).The Public Defender is appoint­ed by the Governor General after con­sul­ta­tion with the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. He holds office until the age of sev­en­ty years. His sta­tus (includ­ing remu­ner­a­tion and terms of tenure) is equiv­a­lent to that of a Judge of the Supreme Court. In par­tic­u­lar, he may only be removed from office by rea­son of inabil­i­ty to dis­charge his func­tions due to infir­mi­ty of mind or body or, for mis­be­hav­iour. The process of removal com­mences with a res­o­lu­tion of both cham­bers of the Parliament (House of Representatives and Senate) that the ques­tion of removal be inves­ti­gat­ed. Thereafter, the Governor General appoints a tri­bunal of per­sons who hold (or have held) office as a judge of a court of unlim­it­ed juris­dic­tion in civ­il and crim­i­nal mat­ters, in some part of the Commonwealth. The tri­bunal is required to enquire into the mat­ter, report its find­ings of fact to the Governor General and, advise him whether the Public Defender ought to be removed from office; in which case “the Governor-General shall by instru­ment under the Broad Seal” remove him from office. (iii) He is not, at any time after he ceas­es to hold office, (whether by removal or oth­er­wise), eli­gi­ble for appoint­ment in the pub­lic ser­vice. Subject to the approval of a Commission of the Legislature (iv) the Public Defender may appoint and employ at such remu­ner­a­tion and on such terms as he pre­scribes, such offi­cers and agents as he con­sid­ers nec­es­sary, to assist him in the prop­er per­for­mance of his func­tions under the Act. (v) By the fore­go­ing pro­vi­sions, inter alia, the inde­pen­dence and secu­ri­ty of tenure of the Office are insti­tu­tion­al­ized. The Public Defender is there­fore appro­pri­ate­ly equipped to com­mit, fear­less­ly and unwa­ver­ing­ly, to the con­sci­en­tious dis­charge of his man­date. (vi) The Public Defender replaced an ear­li­er com­mis­sion, that of ‘Ombudsman’, cre­at­ed by an Act of 1978 (vii) (‘the 1978 Act’) and which, clas­si­cal­ly, was man­dat­ed to inves­ti­gate com­plaints of mal­ad­min­is­tra­tion by pub­lic author­i­ties, defined (viii) to mean a Ministry, depart­ment or agency of Government or the police ser­vices. (ix) The juris­dic­tion and func­tions of the Ombudsman were pre­scribed in Part III of the 1978 Act. ( 9 page doc­u­ment which may be found online in pdf format).

As long as Jamaicans are blind­ed by their con­tin­ued igno­rance and over affil­i­a­tion with the green and orange gangs that run the coun­try these dupli­ca­tions will con­tin­ue and the grand­stand­ing by the likes of Earl Witter will con­tin­ue, actions that serves no pur­pose oth­er than to appease those who cre­at­ed him in the first instance. Once again Jamaica loses.

mike beck­les:

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Sights From The Ulster County Fair:

I attend­ed the Ulster County Fair in New Paltz yes­ter­day August 2nd with my fam­i­ly. Having vis­it­ed the Duchess County Fair every year I was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed at the Ulster Fair. Truthfully the prod­uct did not live up to the billing.I could­n’t wait to get there , with cam­era slung around my neck, I was like a child on a field trip. unfor­tu­nate­ly there was not much to see , no real exot­ic ani­mals, not much in the way of domes­tic ani­mals either.

One great pos­i­tive about the Ulster County Fair that I must men­tion is the price, Irrespective of the amount of patrons in a vehi­cle, the admis­sion was the same $40.00, which also includ­ed admis­sion to all the rides .This was a wel­come pos­i­tive for me in these try­ing finan­cial times.

The truth is There was real­ly not much for me to shoot. The pig race end­ed as quick­ly as it start­ed, I felt like a loos­er cran­ing my neck to catch sight of a 5 sec­ond pig race ‚so I did not both­er wait­ing around. I uploaded a few shots for your view­ing ‚hope you are not offend­ed by the sight of stuffed ani­mals killed sole­ly for human ogling.

In the end the Ulster County Fair is a Duchess County Fair wannabe. Being a coun­try boy, I got sucked in by the hype of the Ulster Fair billing , implor­ing patrons to come to a real coun­try Fair.

I left feel­ing that Fair would have been much bet­ter off in a dis­tant Country.

mike beck­les:

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ARE YOU MAD?

Dr. Fred Hickling has char­ac­ter­ized the Jamaican soci­ety large­ly as mad. This assess­ment drew howls of con­dem­na­tion from many Jamaicans who weren’t too keen on being char­ac­ter­ized as mad . There was also the pletho­ra of high­fa­lutin  the­sis’ writ­ten, that makes sense only to the writ­ers , all in con­dem­na­tion of Dr. Hickling.

As a lay per­son , not sure whether I am mad or not, I was quite pre­pared to let the two sides of the mad debate duke it out ‚Hopefully the peo­ple who feel we are not real­ly all mad, would win the debate , that I could take back to my wife and say ha ha, see I told you I was not mad! She some­times tries to con­vince me I am a crazy Jamaican. She thinks the mad­ness did not get passed down to her, despite the fact her par­ents are Jamaicans. She was born in the United States, so she gets to dis­par­age me as a crazy Jamaican, while rev­el­ling in the good Jamaican val­ues her par­ents impart­ed into her. I keep telling her that the two are an oxy­moron, she disagrees.

Anyway after real­ly look­ing at what is hap­pen­ing in Jamaica I might have to admit I’m not sure what to think, absent any oth­er expla­na­tion, I’m sure this will invoke a lot of crow­ing from the wife , but there may be no way around it. Seriously though let’s take a look at some of what Dr. Hickling said.

Professor Fredrick Hickling and clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist Vanessa Paisley have con­clud­ed that per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der is preva­lent in Jamaica.Their find­ing is con­tained in a sci­en­tif­ic paper pre­pared for pre­sen­ta­tion at the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture in Seattle, Washington, in June. The paper is titled ‘Population Prevalence of Personality Disorder in Jamaica’. some­thing is wrong . According to Professor Hickling, a per­son would be char­ac­terised as hav­ing a per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der if he or she is show­ing signs of a com­bi­na­tion of the fol­low­ing fac­tors: pow­er-man­age­ment strug­gles, psy­cho­sex­u­al dys­func­tion, and depen­den­cy issues​.Data from the four-stage, strat­i­fied ran­dom-sam­pling method, sug­gest that the rate of per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der — approx­i­mate­ly 40 per cent — in the Jamaican pop­u­la­tion is marked­ly high­er than the inter­na­tion­al­ly iden­ti­fied rate of six-15 per cent. “We have to recog­nise that some­thing is wrong and not brush things under the car­pet,” said Paisley.The sci­en­tif­ic sam­pling was car­ried out by Don Anderson & Associates on a rep­re­sen­ta­tive pop­u­la­tion sam­ple of 1,506 Jamaicans age 18 to 64 years. Extrapolation of the data reveals that near­ly one mil­lion per­sons in Jamaica suf­fer from per­son­al­i­ty disorders.Hickling and Paisley believe the find­ings could explain the high risk of behav­iour­al dys­func­tion in the Jamaican population.“Extrapolating these find­ings to our soci­ety, there is no won­der about the high rates of mur­der and vio­lence, rape, and oth­er sex­u­al atroc­i­ties, and crimes such as theft and prae­di­al lar­ce­ny that are crip­pling our soci­ety,” the aca­d­e­mics not­ed in a joint let­ter to The Gleaner pub­lished ear­li­er this month.According to Hickling, if the find­ings don’t influ­ence pub­lic pol­i­cy, “then we are doomed to repeat­ing the same mis­takes of the last 100 years or since Independence”.He is con­vinced that many of the crime strate­gies employed by the secu­ri­ty forces have failed because this sci­en­tif­ic aspect of the crime prob­lem has gone unad­dressed. “Introspection and leg­is­la­tion will not solve this prob­lem. We will con­tin­ue to fail,” Hickling said.Paisley agrees. “We have a fail­ure in our men­tal-health pro­vi­sion. It is hin­der­ing our abil­i­ty to move forward.“Policies should be geared towards the train­ing of prac­ti­tion­ers and imple­men­ta­tion of effec­tive psy­chother­a­peu­tic moda-lities that can be used to treat per­sons with the disorder.“Proper screen­ing meth­ods should be imple­ment­ed in men­tal health treat­ment facil­i­ties, includ­ing screen­ing of per­sons in sub­stance-abuse facil­i­ties,” she added.

des­tig­ma­ti­sa­tion

Paisley also argued that pub­lic-edu­ca­tion pro­grammes util­is­ing all forms of media should be used to enlight­en the pub­lic about the var­i­ous men­tal-health issues that are preva­lent in the soci­ety and the treat­ment options that are available.“Campaigns should also push to fur­ther pro­mote the des­tig-mati­sa­tion of men­tal ill­ness in Jamaica,” Paisley said.Hickling point­ed to the Cuban and Singaporean exam­ples. “Cuba has imple­ment­ed behav­iour-mod­i­fi­ca­tion tech­niques. Many of them are said to be dra­con­ian. People are crit­i­cal of the Cuban mod­el, but it is effec​tive​.In Singapore, if you spit on the street, you are locked up and put into a behav­iour-mod­i­fi­ca­tion programme.“However, in Jamaica, “the crime plans we have ‚catch a small num­ber of peo­ple and many of them get away,” said Hickling.The pro­fes­sor believes behav­iour-mod­i­fi­ca­tion pro­grammes, crime plans, and leg­isla­tive issues need to go hand-in-hand if Jamaica is to tame the crime mon­ster. “The sever­i­ty of treat­ment and leg­isla­tive pro­gramme needs to be depen­dent upon the sever­i­ty of the prob­lem and the lev­els of the peo­ple who are man­i­fest­ing the prob­lems,” he said.Hickling and Paisley’s find­ings have already attract­ed crit­ics who have sought to dis­cred­it the find­ings. But Hickling has some choice words for his detrac­tors: “Of course they would dis­agree because they know noth­ing about it. If you throw stone in a hog pen, the first one who squeals is the one who gets hit. The peo­ple fight­ing against it are not clin­i­cians; they haven’t done the work.“In this whole busi­ness of men­tal ill­ness, it is the one who it lick is the one who squeals,” said Hickling.tyrone.​reid@​gleanerjm.​com

Treatment

Hickling said per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der can­not be treat­ed with med­ica­tion, but treat­ment can­not be ful­ly explored until the coun­try accepts that some­thing is wrong.“There are two ways to stop it (per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der): by pre­vent­ing young peo­ple from devel­op­ing it, and old­er peo­ple from get­ting worse with the use of behav­iour-mod­i­fi­ca­tion psychotherapy.”

Severity Ratings

Mild Personality Disorder

The per­son knows some­thing is wrong with his or her behav­iour and usu­al­ly seeks help.

Moderate Personality Disorder

This is when you can look at some­one and say there is some­thing wrong with his or her behav­iour. Excessive drinkers, smok­ers and eaters, etc, usu­al­ly fall with­in this cat­e­go­ry. But they are per­son­al­ly unaware of the fact that they have a problem.

Severe Personality Disorder

This cat­e­go­ry is much eas­i­er to spot. Persons who have con­tin­u­ous run-ins with author­i­ty and author­i­ty struc­tures fall with­in this group.

Some symp­toms

Person con­sis­tent­ly has pow­er-man­age­ment problems

Psychosexual prob­lems (mul­ti­ple sex­u­al part­ners, sex­u­al dys­func­tion, abnor­mal sex­u­al prac­tices, etc)

Dependency prob­lems.(cour­tesy Jamaica Gleaner​.com)

Proffesor Hickling’s ass­es­ment aside , the rea­son I write this blog is this, are we real­ly mad despite the neg­a­tive con­no­ca­tion ?,and if we are what are the real rea­sons we are trau­ma­tized to this degree? Or, are we just look­ing for an excuse to avoid avoid fac­ing the dis­func­tion. Let’s face it every day there are more and more evi­dence in the news that would tend to sup­port Dr’s. Hicklings and Paisley’s ass­es­ment. I know it is not a sub­ject we Jamaicans are com­fort­able talk­ing about, but the argu­ments both proffe­sion­als make, seem to have a lot of weight in light of what we see hap­pen­ing today in our society.

Proffesor Hickling did not mince words when he respond­ed to crit­ics of the ass­es­ment he and Dr Paisley made quote: “Of course they would dis­agree because they know noth­ing about it. If you throw stone in a hog pen, the first one who squeals is the one who gets hit. The peo­ple fight­ing against it are not clin­i­cians; they haven’t done the work.“In this whole busi­ness of men­tal ill­ness, it is the one who it lick is the one who squeals” . I find Proffesor Hicklins response refresh­ing and unpre­ten­tious, he actu­al­ly summed up the cadre of high­fa­lutin elit­ists that I allud­ed to ear­li­er in this blog, with­out being high­fa­lutin him­self. In essence Proffesor Hickling spoke to the Academics, and the wannabes , but was also able to reach the com­mon man. There was an absence of pre­tence and grandios­i­ty which as a lay per­son I found quite refreshing.

One of the Really inter­est­ing points of note evi­denced here, is the abil­i­ty of Jamaicans to pre­tend, we pre­tend that Jamaica is nice, while we hide behind lay­ers and lay­ers of iron bars in our own homes.

We pre­tend Jamaica nice while peo­ple are being decap­i­tat­ed. Our rea­son­ing? Well those peo­ple did some­thing to people, .

Question is: How long will it be before you do some­thing to some­one and lose your head ?

We pre­tend Jamaica nice while extor­tion­ist suck the life out of the finan­cial sec­tor , using the mon­ey to pur­chase guns and ammu­ni­tion to keep us more enslaved .

Our ratio­nal­iza­tion: Well the busi­ness peo­ple were mak­ing a lot of mon­ey and was­n’t giv­ing any­thing back​.No mat­ter what is going on we pre­tend that as long as it’s has­n’t touched us it does not exist, or it isn’t as bad as oth­ers say it is.

We have fol­lowed this course of denial to what now seem to be the brink of the precipice. Our friends from uptown , not nec­es­sar­i­ly the old monied inter­ests , but the john­ny come late­ly are the mas­ters of this, they are the most pre­ten­tious, these are usu­al­ly black social climbers who have gained some edu­ca­tion ‚and wants their piece of the Aristocracy.

They are worse than the left over mulat­toes from yester-year, who gen­er­al­ly are more rea­soned, those who hap­pen to fall with­in the group char­ac­ter­ized as old cap­i­tal­ists are lit­er­al­ly marked for death (Douglas Manley for­mer health min­is­ter and broth­er of for­mer Prime Minister Manley can relate to that, he was not spared hav­ing his pri­va­cy invad­ed , his broth­er helped to cre­ate that men­tal­i­ty).

The john­ny come late­ly are to be found in all stra­ta of the soci­ety , media, legal fraternity,medical fra­ter­ni­ty, busi­ness, NGO’s and even with­in the church , as we all know at the head of that pack are the polit­i­cal class. These are the ones who shape pub­lic opin­ion, which is real­ly not hard to do in Jamaica if you have a lit­tle money,.They use the media , their pul­pits, and oth­er medi­ums to push their agen­das, mak­ing our coun­try their fief­dom and the mass­es their serfs.

So as we strug­gle with this state of con­tem­pla­tion of whether we are mad as Dr. Hickling et al said , I hope that it will be set­tled that we are not mad ‚maybe just dys­func­tion­al, but hon­est­ly I do see at least one of the signs the good­ly Doctors point­ed to in myself.

I hate it when my wife is right.

mike beck­les:

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Jamaica The Killing Fields:

cour­tesy of the Jamaica dai­ly gleaner

From time to time Jamaicans com­plain about some of the speed lim­its post­ed on cer­tain roads. We all get frus­trat­ed when we can­not zoom to and from where we want to go, and some­times just for the sheer exhil­a­ra­tion and fun, inher­ent in the act of dri­ving. An act that is tru­ly one of the real­ly great plea­sures of life.

If you don’t do it for a liv­ing that is.

July 31st six peo­ple were killed in two sep­a­rate crash­es in Trelawny and St. Mary respec­tive­ly. This morn­ing August 1st a motor­cy­clist and pas­sen­ger were killed in Toll Gate Clarendon.The police are report­ing nei­ther the motor­cy­clist nor the pas­sen­ger were wear­ing pro­tec­tive head-gear. To the best of my knowl­edge there is no law dic­tat­ing manda­to­ry hel­met use for motor­cy­clist and their passengers.

According to Police they are unable to say defin­i­tive­ly what caused the motor cycle crash, they the­o­rized it was speed­ing, the police went on to say no one has come for­ward to say what hap­pened. Word to the police , you guys real­ly are going to have to start look­ing to sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods to explain traf­fic acci­dents with­out any­one com­ing forward.

Long drag marks gen­er­al­ly mean some­one was speed­ing , before a crash,

Short drag gen­er­al­ly mean slow­er rate of speed .

No drag, gen­er­al­ly mean the dri­ver prob­a­bly fell asleep, or was under the influ­ence, real­ly nev­er saw it coming.

An acci­dent is some­thing the dri­ver could not have avoid­ed, and did not cause.

A crash is some­thing that the driver/​s caused out of neg­li­gence or oth­er means.

Example of an acci­dent : a dri­ver oper­at­ing under the rules of the road, is not ine­bri­at­ed by drink, drug, or any oth­er mind alter­ing sub­stance loos­es con­trol due to mois­ture on the road-way, oil, water, snow, and crashes.

A crash is the oppo­site : care­less; reck­less dri­ving, speed­ing, dri­ving under the influ­ence of drink , drugs, or oth­er mind alter­ing sub­stance, or oper­at­ing a vehi­cle in any oth­er way that is in con­tra­ven­tion of the rules of the roads. Police Officers inves­ti­gat­ing crash­es have to be able to make those dis­tinc­tions, this is now a sci­ence and requires the same amount of care and dili­gence that is required in homi­cide and oth­er seri­ous crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions, in some cas­es there needs to be a recon­struc­tion of the accident/​crash site with a view to deter­min­ing the lev­el of crim­i­nal neg­li­gence if any. After all vehic­u­lar manslaugh­ter is a seri­ous offense and should be pun­ished. I implore traf­fic police offi­cers, take your jobs seri­ous­ly, what you do in these inves­ti­ga­tions are sim­i­lar to what crim­i­nal detec­tives do in deter­min­ing crim­i­nal culpability.

For too long peo­ple have been dri­ving with Heineken , and gussi­ness bot­tles between their legs, this is preva­lent amongst those who oper­ate pub­lic pas­sen­ger vehi­cles, as well as pri­vate operators.

Another mind alter­ing drug is the wide­spread use of mar­i­jua­na amongst a wide cross-sec­tion of Jamaicans , it is high time that tests are done on dri­vers at the scene of crash­es to deter­mine whether they are under any influence.

As we all know most crash­es on our roads are not acci­dents , they are crash­es, insti­gat­ed by improp­er use of the road, drink­ing and dri­ving, improp­er over­tak­ing, no sig­nalling, tail­gat­ing, speeding,overloading, and a pletho­ra of road traf­fic infractions.Most crit­ics say well these are not seri­ous crimes , we have more press­ing crimes to attend to. I dis­agree , look at the results of these crashes.

If the car­nage on the roads is to be stopped , the police must first take a no-non­sense approach to speed­ing , a head on col­li­sion with two auto­mo­biles going 40 miles per hour each,crashes at 80 miles an hour, gen­er­al­ly no one walks away from that type of crash with the auto­mo­biles we have today. However this is a tall order as we ask the police to do more , unsup­port­ed by leg­is­la­tion, and a jus­tice sys­tem that is in tat­ters and real­ly does noth­ing to make it clear to scofflaws, that they will be severe­ly penalized.

If the police is to be suc­ces­ful in sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduc­ing the car­nage on the roads, they must first purge the dirty cops from with­in their own ranks. Scofflaws must under­stand they will not be able to hand a few bills to cops and con­tin­ue to break the laws, the actions of the police must how­ev­er be sup­port­ed , hand in hand by stiffer tougher penalties.

What we are see­ing play out on our streets is an exten­sion of the deprav­i­ty and out­right law­less­ness that is now the norm , of course there is no vis­i­ble end in sight with the present crop of politi­cians and oth­ers who ben­e­fit from this chaos.

mike beck­les:

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Fruits Of My Labor:

On July 22nd I wrote a blog, encour­ag­ing you my friends, to uti­lize unused lands and spaces to pro­duce food to sup­ple­ment the bud­get and change the way we eat. I uploaded some pho­tographs of pro­duce reaped from my 1x 3 yard garden.

In the pic­tures there are zuc­chi­ni , toma­toes, pep­pers, and let­tuce. My fam­i­ly had already ben­e­fit­ted from green pep­pers, anoth­er type of let­tuce( red leaf), hot pep­pers , calla­lo, and we have been able to bless a friend of ours with some of our boun­ty My fur­ry friend pic­tured below how­ev­er, was not hap­py with me as I decid­ed that I would­n’t allow him/​her to enter my farm and sin­gle-hand­ed­ly eat all my crops , he did get to enter once after that I clamped down . There is plen­ty of stuff that he eats that I do not eat so we agreed to disagree. 

Until next time I hope you enjoy your gar­den­ing as much as I have, .….…..oh , oh, I almost for­got I saw my first water­mel­on yes­ter­day, I am so excit­ed, any­way bye for now.

wood­chuck

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COP SHOT

A young mem­ber of the intel­li­gence arm of the police force was shot and injured Thursday night .The offi­cer with JUST under two years ser­vice in the JCF sin­gle-hand­ed­ly chal­lenged and killed two gun­men in Portmore, St Catherine, dur­ing a rob­bery attempt.

Allegations are that the rook­ie, who is believed to be in his ear­ly 20s, was stand­ing out­side a gate in Cumberland with friends, when they were held up by two gun­men. The police con­sta­ble was shot in the arm dur­ing the drama.

“We must com­mend his brav­ery, it speaks to the lev­el of his train­ing and con­fi­dence,” head of the Criminal Investigative Branch (CIB), Assistant Commissioner Ealan Powell, told The Gleaner yes­ter­day.[cour­tesy dai­ly gleaner]

Another Police Officer was shot and almost killed as per the above report from Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner. Fortunately this young offi­cer sur­vived , despite being shot. As is to be expect­ed there is no word of con­dem­na­tion from those on talk radio.There is no word of con­dem­na­tion to my knowl­edge from Jamaica’s crim­i­nal rights fra­ter­ni­ty to include the defense attorneys.

Were this valiant young offi­cer not of this cal­i­bre the out­come would most cer­tain­ly be dif­fer­ent for him and his friends.

I urge Jamaicans of all stripes ‚who love free­dom, those who want a safe crime free Jamaica ‚let your voic­es be heard, do not be cowed. I know some­times fear becomes over-pow­er­ing, it some­times seem that the forces of evil can­not be turned around. I do how­ev­er believe that we can make a dif­fer­ence if we let our voic­es be heard.

As is evi­denced by the com­ments under this sto­ry in the Gleaner, you can be heard, when you open your mouths, the sup­port­ers of evil remain silent . As Jamaicans we were a respect­ed peo­ple around the world, we are respect­ed for our abil­i­ties in sports , music, the arts, education,hospitality,and our con­vic­tion in speak­ing truth to pow­er. Our Nation has done so on many occa­sions. Whether its apartheid, race rela­tions in America, pover­ty in the world , or what­ev­er the issue of the day is, we have been in the fore­front of the defense of what is right.

We can return to our glo­ry days of respect in the world , but we must first decide to return to the rule of law, we must return to putting the inter­est of the inno­cent first and putting crim­i­nals where they belong , so that our coun­try can be free, and our peo­ple live out their God-giv­en poten­tial. The great­est right of any per­son is their right to life.

Get well Officer.

mike beck­les:

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SCRAP METAL SAGA

scrap met­al

The Editorial of the Daily Gleaner of Thursday July 28th read: SCRAP METAL BAN A CONCESSION TO DISORDER: After read­ing the arti­cle I was left befud­dled and dis​ori​ent​ed​.My only response was …huh ? Now let me just say I will not ques­tion the sin­cer­i­ty or spir­it in which the edi­to­r­i­al piece was writ­ten. After all the cen­tral theme seem to have been, not bow­ing to crime, at least I am pre­pared to give that to the Editor , But you know me I am always on the side of the rule of law, so I will embrace the the­o­ry of the ene­my of my ene­my is my friend , this once. Well I think the Editor was unpleas­ant­ly sur­prised. All hell broke loose on the online ver­sion of their pub­li­ca­tion, read­ers unleashed an avalanche of dis­gust and con­dem­na­tion at the Article,and on this I must com­mend the mod­er­a­tors for pub­lish­ing 32 com­ments which almost in total­i­ty ripped the Article to shreds. Knowing how the mod­er­a­tors of that forum oper­ate , I won­der how many angry com­ments were actu­al­ly scrubbed. But lets not get ahead of our­selves, lets hear what the Editor had to say.

We are in sym­pa­thy with Mr Karl Samuda’s posi­tion on the deci­sion by his suc­ces­sor, Dr Christopher Tufton, to shut down the scrap met­al indus­try and ban the export of the stuff.

It smacks, as Mr Samuda says, of “sur­ren­der­ing to the rogue ele­ments”. Put anoth­er way, the move rep­re­sents anoth­er retreat of law and order.We, of course, do not pre­sume that the conun­drum pre­sent­ed to Dr Tufton, the recent­ly appoint­ed invest­ment and com­merce min­is­ter, was to be eas­i­ly tra­versed or solved. Nor did it devel­op under his watch.[dai­ly glean­er] Ok mis­ter edi­tor, we are at a loss here,.….. real­ly? so the min­is­ter decides to clamp down on the pil­lag­ing and plun­der of the coun­try’s infra­struc­ture, he insti­tutes a tem­po­rary ban with a view to fig­ure out a way for­ward and you object ? On what grounds do you object sir? For Mr Samuda had strug­gled with the prob­lem of dam­age to infra­struc­ture and theft by scav­engers, who rus­tle met­al of all kinds to cash in on the high price for scrap on the world mar­ket. Indeed, Dr Tufton esti­mates that util­i­ty com­pa­nies and oth­er legit­i­mate busi­ness­es, includ­ing gov­ern­ment agen­cies, have lost up to J$1 bil­lion in mate­r­i­al over the past three years to met­al thieves, who some­times rip down pow­er and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment, with neg­a­tive con­se­quences to eco­nom­ic pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. The prob­lem grew worse as the avail­abil­i­ty of scrap met­al declined, as the price of the com­mod­i­ty hiked and more play­ers entered the busi­ness.[glean­er edi­tor] Great point , and I would imag­ine that since you are con­ver­sant with those real­i­ties then you would see the need for at least a halt of this busi­ness. A halt that would allow for a lev­el-head­ed assess­ment to be done. After all one can­not turn around and head in the oppo­site direc­tion from a dead sprint with­out first com­ing to a stop. But no, the edi­tor went on thus>.

Damning Statement on Insecurity

The Government’s deci­sion to shut down the sec­tor ought to give the aver­age Jamaican no joy, no mat­ter the spin of the Administration, and even if it has the desired effect of curb­ing the pil­lag­ing and deface­ment. For the deci­sion is a state­ment about inse­cu­ri­ty in our coun­try; a tac­it admis­sion by the State of its inabil­i­ty to pro­tect either pub­lic or pri­vate prop­er­ty. This is pre­cise­ly the point we sought to make when Mr Samuda, then the respon­si­ble min­is­ter, recov­ered, by pri­vate ini­tia­tive, a stolen price­less bronze sculp­ture by Edna Manley that was report­ed­ly on its way to being scrap met­al export. No one, in so far as we are aware, was ever arrest­ed, charged, pros­e­cut­ed or con­vict­ed for that theft. Mr Samuda, it appears, has come around to an appre­ci­a­tion of the dan­ger­ous con­se­quences of this kind of sur­ren­der “to the rogue ele­ments”. That, notwith­stand­ing, it is dif­fi­cult for us to believe that it is beyond the capac­i­ty of our Government to ensure, with­in the con­text of a sys­tem of free enter­prise, the order­ly oper­a­tion of a sec­tor of a few dozen peo­ple.[glean­er editor]

Truck laden with scrap metal
Truck laden with scrap metal

The Government’s deci­sion to shut down the sec­tor ought to give the aver­age Jamaican no joy, no mat­ter the spin of the admin­is­tra­tion: Ok so I thought the Article was sup­posed to give an hon­est Editorial assess­ment of a very seri­ous prob­lem , one of many plagu­ing our coun­try. But this seem to be anoth­er cri­tique of the Government. Don’t get me wrong ‚that is the Editorial and indeed the Newspaper’s right, but I thought we were dis­cussing the scrap met­al ban. Anyway since the Editor raised the ques­tion of not acqui­esc­ing to crim­i­nal­i­ty , does­n’t the Editor then agree that the move by Minister Tufton is exact­ly what is need­ed to stem the dis­man­tling of crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture? I thought that hav­ing said all of that he would real­ize the fal­la­cy of his argu­ments and pull back from the brink, but no he had more to say.

[Bad sig­nal]

[If the Jamaican State can’t man­age this, what ought the mass of the Jamaican peo­ple to assume about its abil­i­ty to pre­serve their safe­ty and to pro­tect the right of indi­vid­ual prop­er­ty and, more impor­tant, the main­te­nance of law and order, which is the pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty of the State? But sup­pos­ing that Dr Tufton’s fin­ger-in-the-dyke solu­tion suf­fices for now, his longer-term pro­pos­al for the export of scrap met­al seems prob­lem­at­ic. Companies that gen­er­ate scrap met­al will be allowed, accord­ing to the min­is­ter, to apply for per­mits to export that scrap. This sug­gests that these firms will be forced into a line of busi­ness out­side their core port­fo­lio. And what of oth­er scrap met­al gen­er­at­ed by house­holds or by firms that don’t have the capac­i­ty to organ­ise their own export? We, per­haps, can look for­ward to there being plen­ty of scrap with which to block roads while peo­ple demand jus­tice].[glean­er editor]

Mister edi­tor , the coun­try is drown­ing in the blood of the inno­cent , last week 20 peo­ple were report­ed slaughtered,in a coun­try of 2.7 mil­lion peo­ple , how long do you think it will take to reach you and oth­ers who feel it is some­one else’s prob­lem. The coun­try’s secu­ri­ty forces , under-staffed, under-funded,under-supported, over worked, under paid and demor­al­ized, are find­ing it a huge strug­gle just to con­tain the killing spree which obtains in Jamaica.Our secu­ri­ty forces run­ning from one hot spot to anoth­er, it real­ly is as you said stick­ing their fin­ger in the dyke, try­ing to stem the flow of blood. Arguing that the State should be in a posi­tion to stem the infra­struc­tur­al dis­man­tling is a ridicu­lous attempt at pos­tur­ing and bears no rela­tion­ship with an under­stand­ing of the coun­try’s secu­ri­ty capa­bil­i­ty. The coun­try is fight­ing an exis­ten­tial bat­tle between civ­i­liza­tion and out­right anar­chy, the lat­ter, sup­port­ed and fund­ed by pow­er­ful and well-con­nect­ed peo­ple with­in the coun­try. The forces of good are hav­ing a dif­fi­cult time in that fight, where are the resources to come from that would secure cop­per wire on tele­phone poles and bridge rail­ings? I under­stand the com­ments in the con­text of what ought to be the prop­er course of action, but the coun­try is sim­ply not in a posi­tion to do this , so we are left with a sit­u­a­tion of deal­ing with what is pos­si­ble. It sim­ply is not pos­si­ble to police all of Jamaica’s infra­struc­ture, that makes it dou­bly impor­tant, what the Minister did.

Handcart laden with scrap metal
Handcart laden with scrap metal

As some read­ers have argued online, Jamaica’s scrap met­al indus­try was nev­er a sus­tain­able indus­try to begin with, it is a oppor­tunis­tic indus­try,[indus­try ]used loose­ly . The coun­try does not man­u­fac­ture scrap met­al, it fol­lows that soon­er or lat­er it would get to this, mean­ing those who sell scrap met­al would inevitably resort to steal­ing the prod­uct par­tic­u­lar­ly when viewed along­side the high demand for the prod­uct. The dilem­ma posed to legit­i­mate scrap met­al deal­ers is not con­fined to that sec­tor, but is rather a greater indict­ment on the Jamaican psy­che. If it’s not scrap met­al it would be some­thing else, if some­how investors set up busi­ness­es to buy old build­ing bricks, in no time Spanish town as we know it would be no more . People would lit­er­al­ly dis­man­tle the old cap­i­tal. The issue here is the lev­el of civic-mind­ed­ness that is inher­ent in our peo­ple, or the lack there­of. I await the howls of dis­agree­ment com­ing from the [“eat a food crowd”] . As far as most of these peo­ple are con­cerned it mat­ters not if they destroy the coun­try, brick by brick and have to tread water in the Caribbean sea to [eat the food], coun­try be damned, eat­ing a food is paramount.

Many years ago as a young Police Officer I was part of a team of offi­cers involved in an ear­ly morn­ing raid in a cer­tain com­mu­ni­ty just on the envi­rons of Spanish Town. At the time we were oper­at­ing under emer­gency pow­ers , which allowed us to enter homes with­out a war­rant. A cou­ple of us entered a shack that had a sin­gle bro­ken down cot , and a, met­al cab­i­net in one cor­ner . That was the total­i­ty of the fur­nish­ings in the hum­ble one room abode. Sitting on the cot was a mid­dle-aged gen­tle­man, who was very accom­mo­dat­ing to our intru­sion and queries, I asked him if I could look at was inside the cab­i­net, he agreed. Inside the cab­i­net was a large amount of what appeared to be machine parts, I inquired of him how he came to be in pos­ses­sion of the machine parts? He told me he took them from the lead fac­to­ry in Spanish Town where he worked . I asked him “do you still work there” ? to which he replied ” no offi­cer due to the steal­ing the fac­to­ry closed down”

This prob­lem is not new , it did not start yes­ter­day, and it will not be fixed imme­di­ate­ly. The min­is­ter did exact­ly what need­ed to be done , in step­ping back , tak­ing a deep breath , with a view to com­ing up with a work­able solu­tion. Jamaica’s devel­op­ment is being ham­pered by Jamaicans , we take one step for­ward , then take two steps back­wards. Our econ­o­my, despite sneezes in the world econ­o­my , could be doing marked­ly bet­ter, we are a small coun­try of under three mil­lion peo­ple. We pro­duce food some­times more that we can con­sume , yet we choose to import the same foods , rather that teach farm­ers how to plant crops on a sched­ule to elim­i­nate glut in the mar­ket ‚as well as to ensure con­ti­nu­ity of supplies.

We Kill busi­ness peo­ple because we were told those who work hard and achieved, are evil Capitalists, whose hard-earned rewards should be tak­en away and giv­en to the poor. We spend enor­mous amounts of for­eign exchange we do not have, rather than encour­age invest­ment in solar and wind ener­gy, two com­modi­ties that are nev­er in short sup­ply in the coun­try, I could go on and on about the crime and exor­bi­tant cost of ener­gy that has all but removed Jamaica from the list of places to do busi­ness. Our peo­ple have lit­er­al­ly been reduced to a Nation of beg­gars, some choos­ing to live way above their means. How can we ever change that dichoto­my when our num­ber two for­eign exchange earn­er is remit­tance? the (largess of peo­ple liv­ing abroad).

The num­ber one earn­er tourism , is an acci­dent wait­ing to hap­pen, any upheaval could poten­tial­ly put and end to that sec­tor. What we need at this time I humbly sug­gest is a change in atti­tude, we must become patri­ot­ic Jamaicans again, unless we return to being Nationalist the destruc­tion of our coun­try will con­tin­ue. At this rate soon there will be noth­ing,.….. noth­ing except the most demon­ic of the mer­ci­less mur­der­ers , and a bar­ren waste­land of blood drenched terrain.

Mogadishu any­one?

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Fear Or Forced ?

I recent­ly saw an arti­cle which sug­gest­ed the cas­es of police shoot­ings are out of fear on the part of offi­cers. This notion is so laugh­able if it was­n’t insult­ing to Jamaica’s hero-cops, I would actu­al­ly laugh.

I must admit I did not read the arti­cle as I was pressed for time. I how­ev­er tried to find the arti­cle again and was actu­al­ly direct­ed to the Mail Online a British tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, there I was greet­ed with this head­line. Life and death in the police state of Jamaica: The scan­dal of the offi­cers who dou­ble as state executioners
Read more: http://​www​.dai​ly​mail​.co​.uk/​h​o​m​e​/​m​o​s​l​i​v​e​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​-​1​3​5​2​8​8​5​/​J​a​m​a​i​c​a​-​L​i​f​e​-​d​e​a​t​h​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​s​t​a​t​e​-​o​f​f​i​c​e​r​s​-​d​o​u​b​l​e​-​e​x​e​c​u​t​i​o​n​e​r​s​.​h​t​m​l​#​i​x​z​z​1​T​W​D​S​Y​lsm

This arti­cle which may be accessed at the above link ‚was writ­ten by Johnathan Green. I gen­er­al­ly reserve judge­ment on peo­ple or orga­ni­za­tions when they are going through tri­als. However after read­ing the arti­cle I could­n’t help but harken to who owns this tabloid, and the method­olo­gies that they use to get information.I won­der how much they paid these poor souls to get them to sell out Jamaica. This is a para­graph tak­en from that arti­cle: ref­er­enc­ing the shoot­ing the night sergeant Wayne Henriques and anoth­er offi­cer was slaugh­tered, and six oth­er offi­cers ‚try­ing to help a motorist trapped on moun­tain view avenue was vicious­ly ambushed and shot.

The Mail Online is one of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids that uses all kinds of dirty tac­tics to gain a scoop, includ­ing tap­ping phones, pay­ing Police offi­cers to give them infor­ma­tion and oth­er ille­gal means. The British Police Commissioner and one of his lieu­tenants recent­ly resigned over this scan­dal,. These are the cops that are sup­posed to clean up Jamaica’s police Department , we all know how the mark Shields fish­ing expe­di­tion went, girls drinks , low morale in the force . In the end the coun­try has noth­ing to show for his stay in Jamaica. Shields on the oth­er hand has a secu­ri­ty con­sul­tan­cy firm in Jamaica , what he was after all along. Serves the Authorities right , still stuck in the colo­nial men­tal­i­ty , of look­ing to the euro­pean mas­ters for answers to our problems.

Green the author of the epis­tle was pret­ty sold on Shields , in this sen­tence he artic­u­lates the way he felt about Shields.

Quote ‚People are so des­per­ate and trau­ma­tized that many have lost faith in crim­i­nal jus­tice and the abil­i­ty of the state to pro­tect them,’ says Shields, a sil­ver-haired, prag­mat­ic man who stands at an impos­ing 6ft 6in. He now runs a secu­ri­ty con­sul­tan­cy in Jamaica. Rational, uni­ver­si­ty-edu­cat­ed peo­ple are advo­cat­ing des­per­ate mea­sures which they think are accept­able. They say if a few inno­cent peo­ple get killed, “Well, that’s what hap­pens.”’(mail online)
Well now we know Shields feel that peo­ple who haven’t attend­ed University are irrational.

The bot­tom line about this whole piece of garbage, is that it failed to address the seri­ous nature of urban ter­ror­ism in Jamaica and the seri­ous­ness that secu­ri­ty force mem­bers face day in day out. Does Jamaica have rogue cops ? you bet, should they be root­ed out , you bet, Is this unique to Jamaica ? no! The gar­risons are replete with all kinds of high-pow­ered weapons, some­thing Green , Shields, or Felice do not have to deal with in their coun­try. By his own admis­sion the writer allud­ed to this from some­one he spoke to. quote:

[As dark­ness falls, young men take up posi­tion at key van­tage points, behind low walls. Buried in the ground are guns, loaded and ready. A rau­cous par­ty gets under way. Thumping bass makes the ground trem­ble. I notice a mon­i­tor above the record decks linked to four CCTV cam­eras dis­play­ing entrances to the com­mu­ni­ty. Recently gun­men from that neigh­bour­hood killed the rel­a­tive of a near­by don. Reprisals are expected.‘You are safer here than in a mid­dle-class neigh­bour­hood,’ Andy says with a sly smile We used to have M16s, but they jammed all the time, so now we use AK-47s.’After a moment he adds, ‘When you do good work in the com­mu­ni­ty, peo­ple will kill for you or die for you.’Violence could be trig­gered at any time. Andy is par­tic­u­lar­ly wor­ried about the police.The don from the oth­er area has the police in his back pock­et,’ he declares. ‘It’s a time bomb here. We are walk­ing dead.’Many of the young gun­men have reg­u­lar jobs, but they stay up all night to pro­tect the neighbourhood.The police can’t help you here; you have to defend your com­mu­ni­ty,’ says Andy.He makes it clear that while some vio­lence in Kingston is relat­ed to drugs and oth­er crim­i­nal enter­pris­es, it evolved from politi­cians arm­ing com­mu­ni­ties loy­al to them against oth­er neigh­bour­hoods .Some of the vio­lence is due to the fact that the area falls between two polit­i­cal bound­aries, so it has two MPs, which means that res­i­dents can demand new roads, fund­ing and oth­er perks, which make rival areas jealous.The politi­cians have cre­at­ed the prob­lem,’ says Andy. ‘They are play­ing a num­bers game. It’s divide and rule.’]

Reading this drib­ble is tan­ta­mount to an arti­cle Al jazeera did about the dead­li­ness of Jamaican Police; Imagine al Jazeera, where is their report­ing on the Killings of police offi­cers in Pakistan, and Afghanistan,what about the behead­ing and ston­ing being done to women go clear out your own dirty back­yard. I sug­gest the Mail online clean up their own dirty police force and let us clean up and imprison ours .

The arti­cle went on to talk about a man shot in the Mountain View are of St. Andrew.

[It was here that Ian Gordon, 34, came to vis­it the moth­er of his two young chil­dren, bring­ing them food and mon­ey as he often did. Gordon was a hard-work­ing for­mer art stu­dent. He built a small store from bam­boo where he sold fried fish. He wasn’t to know that a few days ear­li­er three gang­sters had engaged in a shoot-out with police after their rob­bery attempt was foiled. Two offi­cers were killed and six oth­ers wound­ed.](mail online)

This moron glossed over the fact that 8 police offi­cers had been shot the pre­vi­ous night, 2 fatal­ly . can any­one imag­ine if black men had shot 8 British police offi­cers killing 2, how they would have react­ed? . Would there be any Jamaicans left in England? that was not the nar­ra­tive he want­ed , what he want­ed was to draw atten­tion to the actions of the Police​.Now let me be clear I have no infor­ma­tion or evi­dence on the verac­i­ty of his state­ments regard­ing the man killed. I hope how­ev­er that he did not loose his life inno­cent­ly as some would have you believe. What I do know is that you real­ly do not want to be caught any­where in the wrath of any police depart­ment when one of their own has been mur­dered, much less when one con­sid­ered the casu­al­ties the JCF takes.

I frankly won­der why any­one would want that job any­more? , then I think about my rel­a­tives and friends liv­ing there ‚who depend on them , so I salute all clean cops and give them my sup­port. I must be clear , because there are some who accuse me of uncon­di­tion­al­ly sup­port­ing the Jamaican police, this could not be fur­ther from the truth, in fact any­one who fol­low my blogs can attest to the fact that I am one of their harsh­est con­struc­tive crit­ic. As an offi­cer I myself brought 3 of my col­leagues to book and had them kicked out of the force. What I will not do is turn to whole­sale con­dem­na­tion, of the peo­ple who risk their lives and die ‚so that I can live in safety.

There are cer­tain ele­ments with­in the soci­ety that are fraud­u­lent hyp­ocrites , and blood suck­ing leech­es , suck­ing the blood out of those who sac­ri­fice, while they sit in air-con­di­tioned offices , made pos­si­ble by the blood and sweat of Police offi­cers. I served 10 years but nev­er worked in an air-con­di­tioned office. The Commissioner of Police still oper­ates out of the same build­ings at 101 – 103 old hope Road in St. Andrew. Yet as the writer Green allud­ed to Justin Felice’s office is luxurious .

quote: Isolated from the killing streets, at the top of an air-con­di­tioned tow­er block with mir­rored yel­low glass, is the JCF’s Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB). Beyond a bio­met­ric thumb scan­ner near a smoked-glass door, a poster declares, ‘Corruption: it takes two.’I am greet­ed by Justin Felice, head of the ACB, an avun­cu­lar and dap­per for­mer Scotland Yard offi­cer who had great suc­cess work­ing in Northern Ireland. In 2010 his unit removed 184 police offi­cers.(mail online)

I am so insult­ed by this arti­cle, on so many lev­els, but we need to be hum­bled , untill we start respect­ing our­selves and each oth­er ‚we will for­ev­er be the unwant­ed stepchild of the British empire, to be lord over and treat­ed as half wit illiterates .

Just ask Mark Shields what he thinks of us..

mike beck­les :

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WE HAVE TRIED IT THEIR WAY:

Both Jamaican dai­ly’s car­ried the sto­ry of the Prime Minister sug­gest­ing that the mon­sters that are respon­si­ble for the series of grue­some decap­i­ta­tion should face the death penalty.

The prime min­is­ter said he is pre­pared for the debate that will fol­low his sug­ges­tions. Mister Prime min­is­ter , don’t you real­ly mean the howls of con­dem­na­tion that is sure to come. guar­an­teed the lib­er­al crim­i­nal cod­dling forces with­in Jamaica’s media, cler­gy Intelligentsia, legal fra­ter­ni­ty, and the crim­i­nal rights fra­ter­ni­ty will be up in arms…hold it hold it ..you can hold your breadth they will be com­ing at you..

Lets take a look at the death penal­ty : The debate sur­round­ing the death penal­ty will nev­er be set­tled , the pros and cons are pret­ty dug in on this sub­ject. I must con­fess that although I lean toward the death penal­ty being enforced . I have strong reser­va­tions about the prospect of an inno­cent per­son being put to death, that scares the liv­ing day­lights out of me, and places me square­ly on the fence on this issue.

Over the years there have been cas­es in the United States , where seri­ous doubts have been raised about an exe­cut­ed per­son­’s guilt. in States like South Carolina and Texas that does have the death penal­ty. In most cas­es activists point to the dis­pro­por­tion­ate exe­cu­tion of blacks and Latinos over whites that com­mit the same crimes, those have been argu­ments made for gen­er­a­tions , they make up a part of America’s his­to­ry and maybe her shame. In Jamaica the script is almost the same except the argu­ment is not one of racism , but class ‑ism.

Jamaica ‘s colo­nial past , and the Genesis of the con­stab­u­lary gives life to this argu­ment that poor­er peo­ple are treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly by the Police. Much the same way Americas racist Jim crow past, lends cred­i­bil­i­ty to the argu­ments assigned to that country.

Prosecutors and law enforce­ment offi­cials argue that they arrest and pros­e­cute fair­ly, irre­spec­tive of class or race. Those assur­ances have done noth­ing to allay the fears of those opposed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. My per­son­al feel­ings are guid­ed by what was taught to me at the Jamaica police acad­e­my in 1982.” It is bet­ter for the guilty to go free, than for an inno­cent per­son to be con­vict­ed . I have to how­ev­er bal­ance that with some­thing else I was taught at the same insti­tu­tion.” There can be no greater respon­si­bil­i­ty placed on any per­son, than that which requires you to bring the killer of anoth­er human being to justice.

Opponents of the death penal­ty argue that it is not a deterrent.

As a qua­si sup­port­er of the death penal­ty I ask how do you know?

As a child grow­ing up in the sev­en­ties I am acute­ly aware of the dread that was placed on my heart when I heard the word [Wanda ] Mister Wanda was the Hangman in Spanish Town​.As I recall , there was way less crime at that time, and cer­tain­ly the grue­some nature of what we are wit­ness­ing at this time was def­i­nite­ly not there.

The depraved indif­fer­ence, inher­ent in the crimes being com­mit­ted, seem to sug­gest to me a lay per­son ‚that the per­pe­tra­tors do not have any fear of being caught. Reports indi­cate that in some cas­es groups of 30 – 40 heav­i­ly armed men are involved in car­ry­ing out these atroc­i­ties. The sheer num­bers, if true , not to men­tion the weapon­ry involved , sug­gest they fear no one, and are pre­pared to take on all comers.

If a Police patrol that includes two offi­cers come upon these mili­tia mem­bers decap­i­tat­ing some­one ‚what chance do they have, except to try to save their own lives? As I have argued before, this is a mil­i­tary prob­lem, that requires a mil­i­tary solu­tion. The prob­lem in Tivoli Gardens was a mil­i­tary prob­lem that required a mil­i­tary solu­tion, that was effect­ed and now the com­mu­ni­ty of Tivoli gar­dens is open for police services.

What both­ers me is how in the name of God ‚could any­one in their right mind sit on their ass­es and talk about rights in the face of these goings on.

Agitators like Carolyn Gomes of Jamaicans for jus­tice ‚some pas­tors, those in the media who sit on their fat ass­es in radio stu­dios , and a pletho­ra of oth­er bleed­ing heart lib­er­al crim­i­nal sup­port­ing frauds, are quick to con­demn the police for doing what they are sworn to do, erad­i­cate the scourge from among us. Unfortunately some with­in the police force have com­pro­mised their posi­tion , allow­ing crim­i­nals to point to them as the enemy.

According to the prime min­is­ter, Parliament vot­ed more than a year ago to retain the death penal­ty, and the Government will uphold the law.
The Parliament has also passed laws, lim­it­ing the peri­od in which a con­vict on death row must com­plete all his appeals.
With that amend­ment, a con­vict will not be allowed to stretch out the appeals peri­od beyond five years when his exe­cu­tion would no longer be pos­si­ble based on the Pratt and Morgan ruling.
In the Pratt and Morgan case, the UK-based Privy Council held that it was inhu­mane to have a con­vict on death row for more than five years.
As a con­se­quence, con­victs on death row for more than five years would have their sen­tences com­mut­ed to life in prison. ( source: Jamaica gleaner)

Question to the Prime min­is­ter:Why did you not uphold the laws as you swore to do? Let me haz­ard a guess ! you refused to hon­or your com­mit­ment to the Constitution because you are behold­en to Amnesty International and their sur­ro­gates in Jamaica, Jamaicans for Justice.

Amnesty International which is based in London, with offices scat­tered over the world, cer­tain­ly does not get to tell the British Government how to secure that country.British cities are stitched togeth­er with secu­ri­ty cam­eras on every corner,more than any oth­er coun­try in the world,Arguable a civ­il rights vio­la­tion, British cit­i­zens are watched 24 – 7 year round 365. British Authorities do not tol­er­ate crim­i­nal­i­ty in their coun­try, Jamaica is as we speak , try­ing to cope with the avalanche of depor­tees being sent back to Jamaica. Conversely, as a cost sav­ing mea­sure the British Government is will­ing to pay pris­on­ers of Jamaican Nationality to go back home before their peri­od of incar­cer­a­tion is even over .

That amounts to a sim­ple fact we do not want you here. Prime Minister Golding ‚you dithered on this impor­tant issue, as you have on oth­ers. If you are a leader you must chart a course and fol­low that course.Many will hate you, even as they ben­e­fit from your hard deci­sions, great lead­ers have been known to make unpop­u­lar deci­sions and have his­to­ry vin­di­cate them. You have failed to asso­ciate your­self with that greatness.Greatness that could have been attrib­uted to lead­ers like Hugh Lawson Shearer.

As you have dithered on the Christopher Coke issue , you reduced your­self to a mere spec­ta­tor, you could have seized the moment , make the tough deci­sions , live and die with your deci­sions. Unfortunately you allowed your­self to for­ev­er to be seen as a pro­tec­tor of a man, accused of seri­ous crimes. Those who despise you will nev­er love you, you have almost a year to be deci­sive with this mon­ster of ter­ror­ism, put earplugs in , tune out the idiots, save Jamaica. Or for­ev­er be a flash in the pan ‚a sad mis­take in Jamaica’s history.

Jamaicans liv­ing over­seas and at home have long demand­ed that their Government car­ry out their sworn oblig­a­tions to the con­sti­tu­tion and hang those whom the courts say should be hanged, What I find strange is that, Jamaica has one of the most lib­er­al jus­tice sys­tem any­where on the globe, yet on the rare occa­sion they are spurred into order­ing some­one exe­cut­ed , the Executive branch of Government refus­es to car­ry out their sworn duties.

The last exe­cu­tion in Jamaica was car­ried out on 18 February 1988. There were more than a 190 pris­on­ers under sen­tence of death at the end of 1988. Currently there are nine pris­on­ers on death row. The reduc­tion is prin­ci­pal­ly attrib­ut­able to three events. In 1992 the Jamaican Parliament amend­ed the Offences Against the Person Act to clas­si­fy some mur­ders as non-capital.The amend­ment applied retroac­tive­ly and result­ed in the com­mu­ta­tion of sen­tences to life impris­on­ment of a num­ber peo­ple who had been pre­vi­ous­ly manda­to­ri­ly sen­tenced to death. In 1993 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (cur­rent­ly Jamaica’s high­est court which sits in England) decid­ed, in the case of Pratt and Morgan v. the Attorney General of Jamaica, that exe­cut­ing a per­son who has spent a pro­longed peri­od on death row vio­lates Section 17 of the Constitution of Jamaica, which pro­hibits “inhu­man or degrad­ing pun­ish­ment or oth­er treat­ment.(source;amnesty inter­na­tion­al)

What this means is that the Government of the peo­ple’s nation­al par­ty, through­out its entire unprece­dent­ed 181⁄2 years in office, refused to hon­or their oblig­a­tions as guardians of the con­sti­tu­tion. when looked at in tan­dem with the fact that they allowed the secu­ri­ty forces to fall into seri­ous decay,not one detec­tive trained in ten years , it is clear to see where the prob­lem emanat­ed from. Populism, pan­der­ing, and the desire to hold pow­er ‚irre­spec­tive of con­se­quence to coun­try, has brought us to the brink of anarchy.

In 2008 when Jamaica’s Parliament was get­ting ready to vote on the issue of the death penal­ty , Amnesty International had this to say.

As Jamaican Parliamentarians are due to vote short­ly on a motion on whether to retain the death penal­ty, Amnesty International calls on the Jamaican author­i­ties to reject the death penal­ty and instead pri­or­i­tize reforms to the police and jus­tice sys­tem in order to tack­le the coun­try’s vio­lent crime epidemic.

The vote has emerged in the light of dis­cus­sion around the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms Bill, which seeks to replace Chapter III of the Jamaican Constitution ded­i­cat­ed to the pro­tec­tion of fun­da­men­tal rights and free­dom of per­sons. The pur­pose of the vote is to decide whether pro­vi­sions cre­at­ing the death sen­tence excep­tions to the right to life and to pro­tec­tion from tor­ture or inhu­man or degrad­ing pun­ish­ment or oth­er treat­ment, should be retained or delet­ed from the Charter. This vote also comes at a time of spi­ralling vio­lent crime in a coun­try with one of the high­est per capi­ta mur­der rates in the world.

Amnesty International under­stands that high lev­els of crim­i­nal­i­ty cre­ate vic­tim after vic­tim and wel­comes the Jamaican government’s com­mit­ment to address­ing vio­lent crime. However, the orga­ni­za­tion strong­ly believes that the use of the death penal­ty, as well as con­sti­tut­ing a cru­el, inhu­man and degrad­ing pun­ish­ment, is not an effec­tive method of pre­vent­ing crime.

Given the unlike­li­hood of ever being brought before the courts, it is high­ly implau­si­ble that before com­mit­ting a crime a crim­i­nal would con­sid­er the risk of being hung and would refrain from wrong-doing. On the con­trary, the reten­tion of the death penal­ty spreads across the soci­ety the mes­sage that killing is per­mit­ted. The death penal­ty also runs the risk of irrev­o­ca­ble error. Country after coun­try, includ­ing Jamaica, has inflict­ed the death penal­ty upon those inno­cent of the crime for which they were con­demned. Numerous stud­ies have also shown that it tends to be applied dis­crim­i­na­to­ri­ly on grounds of race and class. In a coun­try like Jamaica, where the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem is deeply flawed and cor­rup­tion is rife through­out dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions, how can the pub­lic have con­fi­dence that the state will not kill inno­cent people?

Amnesty International believes that the true solu­tion to the appalling crime sit­u­a­tion does not lie with the death penal­ty. The answers can be found instead by pri­or­i­tiz­ing reforms to the police and jus­tice sys­tem that are already under way. These include imple­ment­ing rec­om­men­da­tions from the strate­gic review of the Jamaica Constabulary Force and the Justice Sector Reform Review and expe­dit­ing the pas­sage of leg­is­la­tion to estab­lish an inde­pen­dent com­mis­sion to inves­ti­gate police abus­es and an Office of Coroner to exam­ine alleged police kills.(source:amnesty inter­na­tion­al )

Jamaicans and peo­ple all over the world . What this lib­er­al left-wing group is say­ing is don’t both­er about the mur­der­ers, don’t both­er about the mer­ci­less killers,the orga­ni­za­tion strong­ly believes that the use of the death penal­ty, con­sti­tutes cru­el, inhu­man and degrad­ing pun­ish­ment, and is not an effec­tive method of pre­vent­ing crime.

Well we have tried it their way, since the 1980’s not one per­son has been made to pay for their crimes of mur­der. This state­ment was issued by that agency on the 21st of Nov: 2008 ‚their way .Since then thou­sands of Jamaicans have ben slaugh­tered , to include Police Officers and mem­bers of Jamaica’s military.

We have tried it their way .

Now let’s do it our way.

by

15 YEARS FOR BETRAYING THE PEOPLE:

I have long main­tained, that most of the prob­lems real or per­ceived, inher­ent in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem is cen­tered around the lib­er­al­ism of judges.

So called extra judi­cial killings,witnesses not appear­ing to tes­ti­fy, the killing of wit­ness­es, cit­i­zens tak­ing the laws into their own hands,citizens not both­er­ing to report crimes, all of the afore­men­tioned ‚has at their Genesis , Judges giv­ing slap on the wrist.This police offi­cer betrayed the trust placed in him.A trust that asked him to pro­tect and serve the Jamaican peo­ple , he betrayed that trust in the most egre­gious , stom­ach turn­ing man­ner. This Supreme court Judge Horace Marsh had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to send a strong mes­sage and he failed. He failed the coun­try , but his great­est fail­ure is to the arrest­ing Officers, who had the char­ac­ter to bring one of their own to jus­tice. He had an oppur­tu­ni­ty to send a strong mes­sage, say­ing once and for all, this will not be tolerated.

He failed.

Sergeant Russel Robinson a mid­dle man­ag­er with­in the JCF must have been aware of the image prob­lems the force had . Over the years Police offi­cers had dragged the name of the once proud Agency through the mud, sub­ject­ing the Agency to ridicule, pri­mar­i­ly by those whose char­ac­ter does not qual­i­fy them to crit­i­cize any­one. And oth­ers who have a vest­ed inter­est in tear­ing down, and dam­a­goging the agency .During my 10 year ser­vice I arrest­ed there cops and charged them with crimes.On each occa­sion the case was prop­er­ly pre­pared, all three were con­vict­ed and even­tu­al­ly boot­ed from the Constabulary. My posi­tion was always that we could not be in the same agency.

Despite the fore­gone, nei­ther of those offi­cers I charged ‚were involved in sell­ing guns nor ammu­ni­tion to criminals.This is one of the most egre­gious and rep­re­hen­si­ble cas­es of police mis­con­duct I have ever heard of ‚9’540 rounds of ammu­ni­tion, and 18 guns , this begs the ques­tion, how many guns and rounds of ammu­ni­tion did Robinson sell? .How many peo­ple died because of those guns and ammu­ni­tion, to include police officers.That is not the only issue here, the guns were sup­posed to be in the pro­tec­tive cus­tody of the police. That by itself make my stom­ach turn. Police offi­cers in the precinct of the court alleged­ly voiced their dis­gust at the sen­tence hand­ed down, I can imag­ine how they would feel from an image stand-point , but I assume those offi­cers were also think­ing about all the cops that were killed over the years. Imagining that they could have fall­en vic­tim to those thou­sands of rounds of ammu­ni­tion, and high-pow­ered weapons Robinson put in the underworld.

Again let me be clear clear , Jamaica is not going to solve its ter­ror­ism prob­lem if Judges con­tin­ue to release crim­i­nals back onto the streets with a slap on the wrists, Interest groups such as the crim­i­nal right Jamaicans for jus­tice and tri­al lawyers have argued vehe­ment­ly that judges must be allowed free­dom to make judi­cial deci­sions based on the spe­cial cir­cum­stances of each case.They argue that Politicians/​Parliament seek­ing to add guide­lines is tan­ta­mount to med­dling with the judi­cia­ry an inde­pen­dent arm of Government​.As a cit­i­zen of this plan­et I agree that Judges must be able to look at mit­i­gat­ing cir­cum­stances in each case and issue their judge­ment accord­ing­ly. What I dis­agree with is, that they should have no guide­lines. Race cars are allowed to go real­ly fast, but they are still required to stay on the tracks, Airplanes have wide open skies , but they have routes, Ships tra­verse ship­ping lanes, despite the enor­mi­ty of the Oceans .Judges must be giv­en min­i­mum guidelines.This removes the prospect of cor​rup​tion​.It removes the pos­si­bil­i­ty of advo­ca­cy from the bench.And it puts crim­i­nals where they belong, in jail.Judges are not elect­ed by the peo­ple, it falls on the peo­ple’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the Parliamentarians to in fact estab­lish guide­lines for them to fol­low. Disgusting crim­i­nal sup­port­ing groups , and the rapa­cious vul­tures called crim­i­nal Lawyers have their own axe to grind , nei­ther of which includes a safe peace­ful, crime free society.

This is a per­fect case for the over­turn of the Judicial sys­tem. So that the Country can start afresh.

mike beck­les:

have your say:

.

by - 1 Comment

Enough With The Support For Criminals:

On May 10th the Spanish Town Police Station came under attack from ter­ror ele­ments with­in the soci­ety. This was not the first time that we have seen this occur­rence, con­verse­ly this has become a trend , as it is in Mexico, and oth­er near and failed states .As a mat­ter of fact there is not even the bat­ting of an eye when Police Stations are attacked and burned to the ground in Jamaica, these are the fruits of the seeds sown over three decades ‚when some in the media told peo­ple to throw stones on Police Stations to sat­is­fy their dis­con­tent. The stone throw­ers have grad­u­at­ed to AK-47 Rifles.

The Police report­ed that the Klansman Criminal Enterprise is rak­ing in just under half a Billion Dollars annu­al­ly. Through extor­tion and Murder for hire, this esti­mate may be under­stat­ed, con­sid­er­ing the stran­gle hold this ter­ror Organization has on the Parish of St Catherine and Clarendon.

As is evi­denced they have no respect for the rule of law and are hell-bent that if the Police dare chal­lenge them they are pre­pared to declare war on the secu­ri­ty Services.This Gang is affil­i­at­ed with the Opposition People’s National Party . The oppo­si­tion Party in Jamaica that have been notice­able absent from the defense of the Jamaican peo­ple, when­ev­er they are required to stand with Jamaica and those who defend her. The have time and again cho­sen polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy, pop­ulism and cheap pan­der­ing to the base instincts of the poor­er class.

That act of betray­al was just one in a long line orches­trat­ed by the PNP .On Friday the 22nd of July 2011 the People’s National Party mem­bers in the Senate vot­ed en mass, with the bless­ings of its nation­al exec­u­tive coun­cil , against the Government’s renew­al of the Constabulary Force (Interim Provisions for Arrest and Detention) Act, 2010. a

The Government, on Friday, used its major­i­ty in the Senate to give law-enforce­ment offi­cials the right to con­tin­ue detain­ing crim­i­nal sus­pects for up to 72 hours with­out charge The par­ty notes that the con­sti­tu­tion­al court, in its land­mark deci­sion hand­ed down on July 15, 2011 in the Nation and Wrightcase, has stat­ed that 24 hours was Parliament’s indi­ca­tion of the peri­od which does not vio­late the require­ment, in the for­mer chap­ter III of the Constitution, for a detained per­son to be brought before the court with­out delay,” said a release from the PNP.The par­ty said the equiv­a­lent pro­vi­sion in the Constitution’s new Charter of Rights requires detained per­sons to be brought before the court forth­with, or as soon as is rea­son­ably prac​ti​ca​ble​.In light of the rea­son­ing of the court in the Nation and Wright case, the par­ty con­sid­ers it like­ly that the pow­er for deten­tion for up to 72 hours with­out con­sid­er­a­tion of bail is incom­pat­i­ble with the Charter of Rights, and can­not with­stand judi­cial scrutiny.Meanwhile, National Security Minister Senator Dwight Nelson, who is also the leader of gov­ern­ment busi­ness in the Upper House, jus­ti­fied the leg­is­la­tion as he argued that the secu­ri­ty forces must be empow­ered with the sup­port of the law to help reduce the scourge of criminality.Making ref­er­ence to the behead­ing of three peo­ple in two inci­dents in Lauriston, St Catherine, Nelson told the Upper House last Friday that the exten­sion of the inter­im pro­vi­sion was warranted.According to Nelson, it is a key piece of leg­isla­tive pro­vi­sion that has strength­ened the crime fight­ing capa­bil­i­ties of the Jamaica Constabulary Force and its auxiliaries.While point­ing to the reduc­tion of mur­ders, since the start of this year, Nelson said over the one-year peri­od when the law was in effect, the police arrest­ed more persons.He not­ed a sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tion in mur­ders in the five his­tor­i­cal­ly trou­bled police divi­sions, and said the leg­is­la­tion had a direct impact on this development.Nelson crit­i­cised the Opposition, which on Tuesday, dur­ing the sit­ting of the House of Representatives, reject­ed the motion to extend the crime measure.Opposition Spokesman on National Security Peter Bunting said the leg­is­la­tion was not the rea­son for the reduc­tion in crime.The Opposition has also ques­tioned the legal­i­ty of the legislation.But Nelson said the deten­tion of a sus­pect with­out charge for up to 72 hours is con­sti­tu­tion­al, based on the advice of the attor­ney gen­er­al, who received advice from the solic­i­tor general.He cried shame on those who did not sup­port the exten­sion, say­ing it was tan­ta­mount to not sup­port­ing the secu­ri­ty offi­cials, many of whom “paid the ulti­mate price,” in crime fight­ing.(Jamaica glean­er July 26th 2011)

This leads us to ask some per­ti­nent questions.(1) why is the PNP silent on the behead­ings being car­ried out by its affil­i­ate The klans man gang oper­at­ing out of St. Catherine and Clarendon.?(2) The PNP must state pub­licly why it choos­es to sup­port ter­ror­ists over law enforce­ment offi­cers and the rule of law. (3) Of the esti­mat­ed half a bil­lion dol­lars the gang rakes in from its ille­gal activ­i­ties , what per­cent­age if any, goes into fund­ing can­di­dates for the PNP’s elec­toral machinery.

The PNP argued that Jamaica’s secu­ri­ty forces, who sac­ri­fice at the per­il of their lives could poten­tial­ly abuse cit­i­zens rights if they were allowed a lit­tle more time ‚to solid­i­fy the gains they made after rout­ing Christopher Coke’s mili­tia from his Tivoli redoubt. Jamaica’s peo­ple’s nation­al par­ty refused to sup­port the work of the coun­try’s hard-work­ing men and women in uni­form ‚en mass as a par­ty, by default throw­ing its sup­port behind Jamaica’s ter­ror­ists net­works. That action to my mind was the great­est act of betray­al and un Jamaican activ­i­ty I have ever seen in my lifetime.

This must be a les­son to the Officers that pro­vide secu­ri­ty to mem­bers of the PNP in what­ev­er capac­i­ty. Understand this, they do not care about you , they do not care if you live or die,.They care more about the maraud­ing despots ram­pag­ing through­out the parish­es of Clarendon and St Catherine behead­ing peo­ple. You must do your duty as a Police Officer and noth­ing more , and remem­ber self-preser­va­tion ought to be para­mount to you. The peo­ple for whom you risk your lives, do not respect you enough to vote to give you a leg up on the mon­sters that seek to destroy you. I know some of you are easy and licky licky, I implore you not to allow your bel­lies to dic­tate where com­mon sense ought to lead, most of you are at least bright enough to get the job , use your intel­lect to fig­ure out what’s going on .This Party is a crim­i­nal sup­port­ing par­ty , as police offi­cers you must under­stand what is hap­pen­ing around you ‚.It is called local knowl­edge. The inci­dents of the pnp ‘s sup­port for anar­chy are well doc­u­ment­ed , I per­son­al­ly have no vendet­ta against them I am a patri­ot , and as a patri­ot I must stand against those whose actions are reck­less, and destruc­tive against Jamaica.

I sup­port nei­ther par­ty , I sup­port the rule of law and those tasked with enforce­ment of said laws, I will not flinch to seek to edu­cate peo­ple on the lies and dis­tor­tions that are being per­pet­u­at­ed on their behalf by those they trust and elect to pro­tect them.a Government’s first respon­si­bil­i­ty to its’ peo­ple, is to pro­tect them. That begins with the fun­da­men­tal and uni­ver­sal right to life, There is no need for civ­il rights if you are dead.The ter­ror tac­tics of Jamaica’s under­world. The same klans man gang has start­ed what appear to any trained intel­li­gent per­son, to be a com­mu­ni­cat­ed trend .This trend is the grue­some act of decap­i­tat­ing their vic­tims. As I have stat­ed in anoth­er post, the rea­son could be three-fold.(1) To dri­ve fear,(2) to send a mes­sage, or (3) they are run­ning low on bullets.

Here is more proof of the won­der­ful work Jamaican Law mak­ers are doing fur­ther pro­tect­ing the rights of criminals.The Charter of Rights, unan­i­mous­ly passed in Parliament recent­ly, states that: Any per­son who is arrest­ed or detained shall be enti­tled to be tried with­in a rea­son­able time and (a) shall be (i) brought forth­with or as soon as is rea­son­ably prac­ti­ca­ble before an offi­cer autho­rised by law, or a court; and (ii) released either uncon­di­tion­al­ly or upon rea­son­able con­di­tions to secure his atten­dance at the tri­al or at any oth­er stage of the pro­ceed­ings; or (b) if he is not released as men­tioned in para­graph (a)(ii), shall be prompt­ly brought before a court which may there­upon release him.(Jamaica glean­er)(Daily Gleaner July 26 ) THE GAVEL :cap­tioned :unfair and unjust.In the quest to appre­hend and pun­ish crim­i­nals, the State ought not to legit­imise breach­ing the con­sti­tu­tion. We have always felt and we remain even more con­vinced that leg­is­la­tion such as the one renewed in Parliament last week, is counter-pro­duc­tive and will result in noth­ing more than the abuse of human rights by the police.(Jamaica dai­ly gleaner).

I am inform­ing the world that 20 per­sons have been mur­dered in Jamaica since the start of this week.

Some of them decap­i­tat­ed. While the entire lead­er­ship of this once beau­ti­ful coun­try ‚to include the entire oppo­si­tion par­ty, speak­er of the house, pub­lic defend­er NGO’s that receive mon­ey from abroad, the lazy unpro­fes­sion­al media , church, all band togeth­er to make sure the rights of crim­i­nals are not vio​lat​ed​.It is about time that the world is made aware that the entire cam­paign of’ (Jamaica no prob­lem ) is a fraud­u­lent façade , con­ceal­ing a dirty under­bel­ly of crim­i­nal­i­ty that per­me­ates the entire fault line of the Jamaican society.Visitors must under­stand they are not safe , the Police are hin­dered from doing their jobs, the rule of law in Jamaica is a myth. Jamaica is ruled by pen­ny oli­garchs who col­lec­tive­ly main­tain the sta­tus quo through a uni­fied and com­pre­hen­sive sup­pres­sion of police actions , uti­liz­ing all organs avail­able ‚to demo­nize the secu­ri­ty forces. They active­ly encour­age out­side agi­ta­tors to come into Jamaica to look for what they char­ac­ter­ize as police excesses.

Many pow­er­ful fam­i­lies with­in the coun­try are involved in seri­ous crim­i­nal activ­i­ties. They are untouch­ables ‚as is evi­denced by Christopher Coke’s pow­er, con­nec­tions, and clout , the author­i­ties did noth­ing to put a stop to his crim­i­nal empire.There are many more like him oper­at­ing under the radar , and noth­ing is being done about them. It took the brave actions of a police offi­cer ‚work­ing in tan­dem with the Americans ‚and for­mer min­is­ter of nation­al secu­ri­ty Peter Phillips, to put a stop to Coke’s pres­i­den­cy. Phillips bucked the sys­tem and signed a mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing with the Americans that allowed for crim­i­nals phones to be tapped .Phillips did not have the con­fi­dence in his par­ty ‚which was the par­ty in gov­ern­ment at the time, so he kept them in the dark.Not even the Prime Minister at the time, Portia Simpson Miller was in the loop about the memorandums.

This sup­ports my argu­ment about crim­i­nal sup­port by the People’s National Party​.It speaks vol­umes about Peter Phillips con­fi­dence in his Prime min­is­ter. The cab­i­net and the mem­bers of his own par­ty to sup­port the rule of law. Or worse, not to inform their crim­i­nal affil­i­ates that they were poten­tial­ly being lis­tened to by the Americans.

Christopher Coke did not rise to promi­nence under the JLP. The People’s National Party has approx­i­mate­ly six gar­risons for every one that is aligned to the Jamaica labor Party​.It was, and still is, no mys­tery why the People’s National Party can­not sup­port the police in their actions to uphold the laws. As I have stat­ed, a large part of the Jamaican pop­u­la­tion ben­e­fits in some way from crim­i­nal­i­ty, a recent cor­rup­tion assess­ment places Jamaica 87 on the cor­rup­tion index for 2010, up from 84 the pre­vi­ous year. But not a posi­tion we should be proud of .In the 2009 Corruption Perception Index Jamaica was ranked 99 out of 180 coun­tries, a dete­ri­o­ra­tion from the rat­ing in the pre­vi­ous year when the coun­try placed 84.

At every turn along the way we see the mem­bers of the Peoples’ National Party sid­ing with whomev­er has a grouse with the rule of law, This is unprece­dent­ed , even in Iraq and Afghanistan Politicians of all stripes argue for the rule of law, and give their sup­port to those tasked with uphold­ing it.

Jamaica’s Politicians are a unique bunch. This par­tic­u­lar trait of not giv­ing sup­port to the agen­cies of law enforce­ment, is not con­fined to the PNP but for all intents and pur­pos­es becomes ampli­fied based on their actions.

One would rea­son­ably con­clude that after being in Opposition they would get. One would assume they would have a clue. That no coun­try can progress or pros­per with­out the rule of law, estab­lished, and adhered to. Here’s Portia Simpson Miller in response to queries from an inter­view­er on (TVJ smile Jamaica june 3rd 2011) what would you do as a mat­ter of pri­or­i­ty if you are elect­ed Prime Minister of Jamaica , what would you address as a pri­or­i­ty”? Simpson miller :I have sev­er­al pri­or­i­ties and hence the pro­gres­sive agen­da, that lays down the var­i­ous areas of concentration,certainly the growth and devel­ope­ment of the country,economic growth and developement,education , jobs,.….…

Interviewer jump­ing in , with a view to help­ing her focus, But those are kin­da broad, but what would you do to fix what you under­stand is a bro­ken econ­o­my.? There are a num­ber of areas that we … we can look on that will be able to cre­ate jobs , we look at what you men­tioned ear­li­er agri­cul­ture and the val­ue added, you notice every year it’s now man­go time, we eat what we can and the rest just fall on the ground and rot, .veg­eta­bles now when you see the farm­ers loos­ing their crops because they have no market,how is it we can get fac­to­ries into a num­ber of the parish­es, that will process all of these things , and so that we can con­sume what we can and then oth­ers the rest of the world will share with us ‚and I think agri­cul­ture is one in terms of agri­cul­ture and the val­ue added.And I think urban and rur­al devel­ope­ment will also be a focus apart from look­ing at the whole ques­tion of ener­gy , because I think that is crit­i­cal in the coun­try at this time, and look­ing at all the oth­er areas cer­tain­ly busi­ness­es, aahm small medi­um size , while not ignor­ing the big busi­ness­es, and con­tin­ue to give them sup­port, well we need to look at all those areas that will allow the econ­o­my to grow. We need to look seri­ous­ly at the devel­ope­ment and planned devel­ope­ment of Jamaica , both rur­al and urban, we tend to look at the towns and the cities and we ignore the rur­al areas,and the deep rur­al areas , and I think that’s why we have the migra­tion into .…so there are a num­ber of areas that are well doc­u­ment­ed in the pro­gres­sive agen­da , and there are a num­ber of per­sons that are look­ing at it and they are giv­ing us some crit­i­cal feed­back and sug­ges­tions that we are tak­ing on board so we can have the launch, and then to have wider con­sul­ta­tions , broad­er con­sul­ta­tions , and all of that.

Whew !!!!

Simpson Miller then jok­ing­ly chid­ed the mod­er­a­tor for giv­ing her too short a time.

Absent from the whole dis­joint­ed tor­tured ram­ble, was an under­stand­ing of what is the para­mount imped­i­ment to Jamaica’s eco­nom­ic prob­lems. crime and vio­lence has sti­fled and stunt­ed growth over the last four decades with the peri­od of the eight­ies being a respite in between​.How can some­one gear­ing up to once again take the reins of lead­er­ship of a coun­try , who does­n’t even under­stand the com­plex issues of the day, be expect­ed to come up with, and exe­cute a plan to address them?

The seri­ous and urgent issue of Jamaica’s ever esca­lat­ing crime prob­lem, did not even make the list of her pri­or­i­ties. During that whole inar­tic­u­late, inco­her­ent ram­ble, not one men­tion was made about the seri­ous issue of crime.If you can’t see it, how can you fix it.?

Our Country’s secu­ri­ty can no longer be a Political foot­ball, to be kicked around by the two polit­i­cal par­ties , for their own gain. It is now time for both to come togeth­er, and not only denounce ter­ror­ism and crime, but through the leg­isla­tive process make it bad busi­ness to be involved in the Crime business.

There is no short­age of big mon­ey Lawyers , who demand that ter­ror­ists tak­en off the streets , be charged or prompt­ly released. This leads to the con­clu­sion that there are peo­ple in high posi­tions that have no inter­est in see­ing the entrails of this mon­ster evis­cer­at­ed. I sug­gest that a sim­i­lar statute to the American Rico Statute be enact­ed that will effec­tive­ly remove this scourge,The time as come for those who iden­ti­fy with, are asso­ci­at­ed with, and are a part of Gangs, to be so linked and removed from society.This must be done despite the pre­dictable howls from Defense Lawyers , and crim­i­nal sup­port­ing groups like Jamaicans fo jus­tice ‚when crim­i­nals are removed from the streets. There are more than enough spe­cial inter­est groups with­in Jamaica that advo­cates for Criminals and their way of Life, I would like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to advo­cate for Jamaica and Jamaicans who want a decent law-abid­ing way of life.

mike beck­les:

have your say:

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AMERICA’S POTENTIAL DEBT DEFAULT:

How unprece­dent­ed would default be? The United States has nev­er failed to repay a debt in its his­to­ry. But it has twice altered the repay­ment terms, notes a study by Carmen M. Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth S. Rogoff of Harvard University. In 1790, when the infant repub­lic took over the states’ colo­nial-era debts, it deferred some inter­est for 10 years. A more per­ti­nent case occurred dur­ing the Great Depression. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt deval­ued the dol­lar by 41 per­cent against gold. This helped end the vicious cycle of bank fail­ures, defla­tion and default that had wors­ened the eco­nom­ic down­turn, but it cre­at­ed anoth­er dilem­ma. Since the Civil War, bor­row­ers in the United States, includ­ing the gov­ern­ment, had rou­tine­ly issued bonds that allowed the hold­er to demand repay­ment in gold or its dol­lar equiv­a­lent, based on the price of gold when the bond was issued. Devaluation would have dra­mat­i­cal­ly raised, in dol­lar terms, the bur­den of repay­ment. So in 1933, Congress repealed the gold clause, a deci­sion the Supreme Court upheld in 1935.

at: http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​w​p​-​d​y​n​/​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​2​0​0​9​/​0​1​/​0​9​/​A​R​2​0​0​9​0​1​0​9​0​2​3​2​5​.​h​tml

So as this new dead­line on the debt ceil­ing looms, we are left won­der­ing what will hap­pen ? The President has already com­mit­ted to giv­ing more than most Democrats are com­fort­able with . Democrats are not pleased when they con­sid­er what the details of those con­ces­sions could poten­tial­ly mean to the lives of actu­al peo­ple who ben­e­fit from Medicare,Medicaid and Social Security.Americans whom have worked and con­tributed, with the promise that when they retired those enti­tle­ments would be there.

President Obama is forced into a cor­ner either way. On the Morning after his elec­tion Republican awoke to the real­i­ty that a black man would be occu­py­ing the white house, they decid­ed they would do every­thing in their pow­er to destroy his pres­i­den­cy, even if it includ­ed destroy­ing the coun­try . It is evi­dent the repub­li­cans who wrap them­selves in the American flag, pre­tend­ing to hav­ing a monop­oly on patri­o­tism, did not care of the con­se­quences to the coun­try .What mat­tered was that Barack Obama has to be stopped.

Their High Priest ‚the Ultra right-wing wind bag, Rush Limbaugh artic­u­lat­ed the way for­ward for the repub­li­can minor­i­ty. they want­ed Obama to fail, Senators , Congressmen and women com­menced to par­rot that refrain ‚when some­one dared to point out to them that it would mean the fail­ure of the coun­try, they argue that the President’s agen­da was so lib­er­al , so un-American that it would be a good thing for those poli­cies to fail because if enact­ed it would be tan­ta­mount to the Destruction of America.

Those were the same argu­ments made when FDR was enact­ing his agen­da, the same argu­ments made when Slavery was abolished,On every occur­rence of a pro­gres­sive agen­da that includ­ed the peo­ple , repub­li­cans resort to fear mon­ger­ing and race bait­ing to scare the pop­u­la­tion into dissent.

In Obama’s case they chose a path that was trav­elled before , they sought to make Obama different.

The car­i­ca­ture and the car­toon depic­tions at the tea part ral­lies were rem­i­nis­cent of a time that most intel­li­gent peo­ple thought were behind America. They con­spired to de legit­imize his pres­i­den­cy on the argu­ments he was born out­side of America, any­one under­stand­ing how American Government works , under­stands the tiered sys­tem of clear­ance that obtains, in order to move up the fed­er­al ladder.

At every step seri­ous back­ground checks are done . Does any­one in their right mind believe that under any cir­cum­stance, America would allow an imposter, an ille­git­i­mate Manchurian can­di­date to occu­py the white house ?

The tea par­ty peo­ple embraced this fal­la­cy and to this day they con­tin­ue with their racist igno­rant cam­paign to make the President an outsider.

Unfortunately Barack Obama con­tin­ues to smile with them as if he real­ly believes they want to work or com­pro­mise .Even Republicans with com­mon sense, which is an oxy­moron these days , are afraid to men­tion the word com­pro­mise, when it is men­tioned in the same sen­tence with the name Barack Obama.

I nev­er thought I would see the day when Orrin Hatch of Utah would be viewed as a mod­er­ate. Such is the puri­ty test with­in what used to be the repub­li­can par­ty. That Party is now dom­i­nat­ed by racist ide­o­logues ‚who wrap them­selves in the American flag, pre­tend­ing to care about fis­cial pru­dence, a fis­cal matu­rit­ry that came about as as soon as Obama took office.

The Tea par­ty cared noth­ing about fis­cal proper­i­ty when Bush 43rd was President. after inher­it­ing a bal­anced bud­get from Clinton it took him two years to squan­der over a tril­lion dol­lars of sur­plus, start­ed two wars and put the American econ­o­my into a near depression.

Obama is still grap­pling with that mess today. The hyp­ocrites who call them­selves tea par­ty patri­ots did not care then.They care because a black man is pres­i­dent and no one wants to call it what it is .I nev­er dreamed I would see the day when Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and Orrin Hatch of Utah would be seen as moderates.Such is the lit­mus test ‚that once mod­er­ates, such as John McCain has been forced to the far right ‚toward the fringe, to ensure their polit­i­cal sur​vival​.One thing is cer­tain we know what repub­li­cans stand for .Democrats could learn a les­son or two about prin­ci­ples from them.

What well think­ing per­sons here, and around the world real­ized, was that the flames of American big­otry and racism were not extin­guished, they were mere­ly reduced to smoul­der­ing embers cam­ou­flaged with ashes.

It seemed that the President was some­how still drunk with the dis­be­lief of his ascen​den​cy​.It appeared he believed Republicans would be pre­pared to work with him , the first African-American President.

It seem the President is delu­sion­al in his belief that the Republican Party would want him a black man ‚to have any notable suc­cess to point to. It was evi­dent to any­one watch­ing ‚repub­li­cans were going to sub­vert every­thing they could , effec­tive­ly run­ning out the clock on his presidency.

President Obama, despite a major­i­ty in the house and senat,was unable to gar­ner any sup­port from repub­li­cans, for his sig­na­ture accom­plish­ment ‚the health care bill dubbed Obama-care, Democrats squab­bled amongst them­selves as they have always done , a move which sucked the good­will Americans had for the new Administration.The result of the dis­af­fec­tion was evi­dent in the midterm elec­tions, a dis­af­fec­tion Obama called a shellacking.

Mark you, the President did not yet artic­u­late a way for­ward , he had just tak­en office when the anti Obama onslaught commenced.But let’s get back to the issue at hand for a sec­ond , President Obama went into the dis­cus­sions mak­ing give­aways, some­thing Former President GW Bush would nev­er do. President Bush famous­ly stat­ed he nev­er nego­ti­at­ed with him­self, this was evi­dent through­out his two terms in office, on every issue he ram­rod Democrats, herd­ing them to sign onto his agen­da, if they resist­ed he would take to the air­waves and label them obstruc­tion­ists, lit­er­al­ly mak­ing them look un-American.

Tom Daschle stood in the way of the rad­i­cal right-wing assault on the Constitution ‚they made sure that all the mon­ey his oppo­nent need­ed was made avail­able to him. They poured untold mil­lions of dol­lars into South Dakota and suc­ceed­ed in unseat­ing Daschle, this was unprece­dent­ed in recent times, there was an un-writ­ten rule that the President would not go to the home state of the Majority leader to cam­paign against him.

Bush did that ‚unashamed and un apolo­getic. Democrats were rail­road­ed into sign­ing onto the Patriot ACT after September 11 at risk of seem­ing to sup­port ter­ror­ists if they dared even ques­tion what was in the ACT. hon­est mem­bers of the Democratic Party have con­fessed they nev­er even both­ered to read the volu­mi­nous Bill the Bush Administration’s Lawyers gave them , they just vot­ed Aye! Rights and Civil Liberties be dammed.

So where does this President find him­self? he made mam­moth offers to the Republicans,they slapped his hand away.They want con­ces­sions that would be so far-reach­ing there would be wide­spread civ­il war in the Democratic Party, a move that would effec­tive­ly seal the pres­i­den­t’s fate.

On the oth­er side of the coin if the coun­try goes into default , it will be a scar­let let­ter on his Presidency, Republicans cal­cu­lates that either way Obama looses.

There are numer­ous argu­ments being made detail­ing the con­se­quences to the econ­o­my in the event the Nation defaults on its debts, new­ly installed IMF chief Christine Lagarde said Sunday, quote ” there would be real nasty con­se­quences to the glob­al econ­o­my if the United States default­ed on its finan­cial oblig­a­tions, end quote.

Despite these pro­jec­tions and all of the assess­ments that have being in the pub­lic domain from qual­i­fied Economists and oth­ers, Republicans in the US Senate and the right-wing nut cas­es in the house, elect­ed under the tea par­ty ban­ner, con­tin­ue to play polit­i­cal brinks­man­ship with the American and glob­al Economy.

They have made a deci­sion that Ideological puri­ty is far more impor­tant to them that leav­ing a liv­able coun­try to their children.

mike beck­les:

have your say;

by

EXPOSING THE LIES:

The fol­low­ing is an inter­view giv­en by Carolyn Gomes to a local tele­vi­sion station.

Dr. Carolyn Gomes OJ (born March 30, 1958 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican human rights activist. Dr. Gomes is also the co-founder and cur­rent Executive Director of Jamaicans for Justice.[1][2] On December 10, 2008, Dr. Gomes received the pres­ti­gious United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.[3] On October 19 of the next year, she was hon­ored with the Order of Jamaica, in recog­ni­tion of her advo­ca­cy for human rights. Notice that Gomes has received one of the high­est hon­or that can be bestowed on any Jamaican.

http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​T​H​P​K​7​Y​8​k​Rn4 See Gomes and JFJ at the Inter American Commission of Human Rights hear­ing in Washington DC.

Interviewer ; You said you made a pre­sen­ta­tion to the inter-American com­mis­sion on human rights the report looked at human rights issues in Jamaica since the state of emer­gency last year, now on the set with us to tell us more about that report is Jamaicans for Justice Dr. Carolyn Gomes exec­u­tive direc­tor of Jamaicans for jus­tice, good morn­ing again, wel­come once again to smile Jamaica, 

Gomes: Good morn­ing nice to be here with you>

Interviewer: So you did what exact­ly when you said you made a presentation.?

Gomes: We looked at the data we had in our files over the course of last year and we put it all togeth­er and we made a report, we asked for an oppur­tu­ni­ty to present it in per­son ‚because we could have sent it in and said here’s our report, but we ahem got an oppor­tu­ni­ty to present it in per­son at the inter-American com­mis­sion in Washington there was a pan­el of three com­mis­sion­ers plus the deputy exec­u­tive sec­re­tary and then the Government had an oppur­tu­ni­ty to respond and was rep­re­sent­ed by ambas­sador Marks and a mem­ber of the Consular staff.

Interviewer: And your report sug­gest­ed what? that you did­n’t like what was going on did you give a per­son­al opinion?

Gomes : We said we very upset by the rise in what was already an unten­able num­ber of fatal shoot­ings by the Police, which in fact went up by over 20% last year based on their own fig­ures, year on year, and that does not include the deaths of those killed in Tivoli, or those who the fig­ures acknowl­edged were killed by sol­diers out­side of Tivoli, when you put all of those togeth­er, we were at a rate of almost 400, and in con­text more than one in five peo­ple who died vio­lent­ly, died at the hands of the police.

Let’ just back up right here because I can­not rely on the Interviewer to ask ques­tions backed up by real facts and fig­ures of this per­son who took Jamaica’s name abroad, so let me present some facts.

Jamaica has one of the high­est mur­der rate in the world ‚we com­pete with coun­tries like Mexico and Colombia.

Jamaica’s crim­i­nals are some of the most vio­lent crim­i­nals on plan­et earth,they love to kill police officers.

During the time that this so-called report was pre­sent­ed the coun­try was expe­ri­enc­ing one of the most tur­bu­lent peri­ods in its his­to­ry, police sta­tions were torched , offi­cers mur­dered, to include eight offi­cers shot in one ambush on moun­tain view avenue , two offi­cers died that night at the hands of ter­ror­ists includ­ing the pop­u­lar sergeant Wayne Henriques.

Members of the mil­i­tary were killed.

Members of the ISCF were killed.

Untold num­bers of peo­ple were slaugh­tered by urban ter­ror­ists loy­al to alleged drug and gun run­ner Christopher( dudus )Coke.

The report made no men­tion of any of these facts.

Let’s read some more.

Interviewer: Does it nec­es­sar­i­ly mean an abuse of human rights when when.….

Gomes: Police kill? No absolute­ly not!and that is one of the things we have con­tend­ed from the very begin­ning Simon that the police are in fact on e of the only groups in the coun­try that are allowed to legal­ly kill some­body in defense of them­selves or oth­er peo­ple.…… the point becomes what are the legal­i­ty of a shoot­ing one of the things we have said from the very begin­ning is that the sys­tem put in place aren’t able to cred­i­bly clear police­men of act­ing absolute­ly with­in the law,and right­eous­ly, they call it a right­eous shooting.…

Interviewer inter­rupt­ing; so does that mean the process or the pro­cess­ing of each inci­dent is not suf­fi­cient and suit­able to give you a prop­er deter­mi­na­tion as as …

Gomes jump­ing in: the whole thing from the begin­ning com­ing right up to the end. the begin­ning is the preser­va­tion of the crime scene,or the shoot­ing scene if you pre­fer, don’t move the bul­lets so that you can make a deter­mi­na­tion, don’t move the spent shells, don’t move the dead per­son, take pho­tographs etc etc.

Let me just jump in here , what a load of crock.Every time a killing occur it falls on some­one to inves­ti­gate that killing, irre­spec­tive of who does the shoot­ing there are peo­ple called Police that are required to do the inves­ti­ga­tions, if Gomes does not believe that Jamaican police are capa­ble of polic­ing Jamaica, then she should come out and say so , clear­ly she some­how feel that a coun­try that is over 90% black is inca­pable of polic­ing itself , is Carolyn Gomes push­ing for for­eign inter­ven­tion in our coun­try , from the lies with­in this report,?

Where does Carolyn Gomes get her crime scene inves­tiga­tive skills from? last time I checked she was a pedi­a­tri­cian, I am unaware that being a baby doc­tor qual­i­fies one on crime scene man­age­ment , but then again this is Jamaica where every­one knows how to do every­one else’s job but can­not do theirs, , let’s go on.

Gomes: then there’s the bal­lis­tics and you know we must be the stu­pid­est coun­try in the world because we have the high­est rate of gun crime and we have inad­e­quate bal­lis­tic test­ing facilities..

I am going to jump in here because I am get­ting real­ly mad right now, did I hear right,? did she call my coun­try stupid?

Now this is real­ly telling, she has no respect for the peo­ple she pur­ports to be con­cerned about, this is about Carolyn Gomes and her ego, and what­ev­er moti­va­tion she has for the anti police cru­sade she is on, but trust me she will be exposed. I have always believed that if an inves­ti­ga­tor real­ly wants the truth , just let the sus­pect talk „ let the sus­pect tell their ver­sion of events , then when he or she is fin­ished ask them to repeat what they had just relat­ed to you, the lies will be exposed.

So we know Gomes thinks our coun­try is stupid, .!

Was this the rea­son she opt­ed for a face to face meet­ing with her for­eign han­dlers with­in the inter-American com­mis­sion in Washington? or did the object of the face to face have a more sin­is­ter motive, say financial ?

Who funds Jamaicans for jus­tice? where does the mon­ey gets spent? does the Lobby group pay tax­es on the monies it takes in from over­seas, that influ­ences, and shape pol­i­cy with­in Jamaica ? who does over­sight of the Groups finances? the group hires high-priced lawyers , what rate are they paid,? what ser­vice do they pro­vide for the monies paid to them? Is there an inde­pen­dent audit of the groups books to deter­mine fideli­ty? , Is the lob­by group in com­pli­ance with all aspects of Jamaican laws par­tic­u­lar­ly as it relates to accept­ing funds from out­side the coun­try? .how much does Gomes and staff gets paid if any, sep­a­rate from the lawyers?

Now did she say we have the high­est rate of gun crime? yes she did say that , and again she is wrong , even when she tries to be objec­tive, we do not yet have the high­est per capi­ta rate of gun killings and I hope we do not attain that dubi­ous distinction.

Interestingly enough she made no men­tion of that in the report she took to her handlers.

She then moves on with the ram­bling unsub­stan­ti­at­ed attack , this time aimed at the office of the DPP.

Gomes:Then there’s that and all the way through to the chal­lenges of the office of the direc­tor of the pub­lic pros­e­cu­tion, it’s more than a year to get a rul­ing out of that office, she her­self acknowl­edges that she has a back­log of 700 cas­es of police fatal shoot­ings, and from there we get to court , we have cas­es that takes twelve years to pass through the coro­ner’s court, twelve years…

At this point one of the two men that made up the pan­el inter­view­ing Gomes ‚who kept chuck­ling , , mark you he had no notes nor any kind of doc­u­ments to coun­ter­act the bile she was spew­ing , chimed in to Gomes claims.

Interviewer; Which is absolute rubbish!

Gomes: At the end of it and the when the coro­ner’s jury says that the police man must be charged for mur­der you back in court , supreme court, wait­ing on a trial.

Here are some impor­tant infor­ma­tion that Gomes should have her lawyers check. Jamaican law allows the DPP to file crim­i­nal charges against a police offi­cer to quell pub­lic out cry.Gomes may be unaware of this but the crim­i­nal Dons are well aware of it,hence the ever-present demon­stra­tion and pha­lanx of paid mourn­ers after every fatal shoot­ing by mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces.This accom­plish­es three things for the crim­i­nal under­world, (1) It gets front­line cops out-of-the-way, (2)demoralize oth­ers, and (3) cre­ates more oppor­tu­ni­ties for their crim­i­nal empires.

For those who won­der why so many cas­es of police shoot­ings dies before they leave the DPP’s office ‚and some gets dis­posed of for want of pros­e­cu­tion , the rea­son plain and sim­ple is that there was no evi­dence of wrong doing in the first place, .Gomes her­self allud­ed to that fact, right here in this inter­view, check your laws.

Interviewer:In your report you said it means that one in five homi­cides , and I use that word delib­er­ate­ly, com­mit­ted in Jamaica in 2010 was com­mit­ted by the secu­ri­ty forces.

Gomes: Correct. correct,homicide does­n’t say whether it was a right­eous , I mean jus­ti­fi­able homi­cide or not, it say that it was a fatal shoot­ing one in five shoot­ings were com­mit­ted by the secu­ri­ty forces.

At this point both ques­tion­ers chimed in .

But that’s inflam­ma­to­ry language.!

Gomes : Only to the lay per­son! It has tech­ni­cal mean­ing that does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean mur­der, it does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean manslaugh­ter either , you have vehic­u­lar homi­cide, which can be you know.…..

Vehicular homi­cide? what or how does vehic­u­lar homi­cide fac­tor into this con­ver­sa­tion , in what con­text is it applic­a­ble, I thought the inter­view was about the lies she took to Washington , which by the way the Golding Administration called her out on , to which she had no response. Serve Golding and his friends right they are the ones who con­tin­ue to cheap­en National hon­ors on every char­la­tan that comes around , ignor­ing Jamaicans who sac­ri­fice for country.

Interviewer; but again it con­jure up ‚.. isn’t that a sug­ges­tion that they were doing this deliberately’?

Gomes : no it’s not !!!!! We are not say­ing that police are doing it though there is some ques­tion marks about what occurred in Tivoli and some of the shoot­ings that come to us.

Interviewer :Even the num­bers you don’t agree with , I think they said 73 you are say­ing   …

Gomes: We don’t have any evi­dence of more than 73, but in, we don’t ‚that 73 does­n’t take into account 3 peo­ple who have dis­ap­peared since being seen in the com­pa­ny of the secu­ri­ty forces , they can’t be seen since can’t be found so if you add that it’s 76. and the peo­ple dis­pute the 73, and so that is the rea­son we stand with Earl Witter for a com­mis­sion of enquiry, because there are a num­ber of things that needs to be clar­i­fied for Jamaica includ­ing how many peo­ple died.

What? the same lay per­sons that are from the stu­pid country?…but arent these the peo­ple you care about , and on whose behalf you are wag­ing this cru­sade, are you say­ing they are too stu­pid to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between a jus­ti­fi­able killing and a case of exces­sive police force?I will bet my life every­one knows the dif­fer­ence but Carolyn Gomes does not have too much con­fi­dence in the intel­lec­tu­al capa­bil­i­ties of the Jamaican peo­ple, the not-lay per­sons in Washington I am sure under­stands the dif­fer­ence, how insulting!

At this stage I was through with this non­sense I watched the rest of the inter­view which offered no more sub­stance or sense than the fore­gone , it was a love fest of sorts between her and the two males con­duct­ing what passed for an interview,basically a pletho­ra of issues, with Gomes gen­er­at­ing a lot of heat and absolute­ly no light.

Pictured top left is Jamaicans for jus­tice Carolyn Gomes receiv­ing a National hon­or for her work defend­ing criminals.

Top right is Sergeant Wayne Henriques who was slaugh­tered along with anoth­er offi­cer on moun­tain view avenue ‚.Six oth­er offi­cers were shot in that Ambush that night. Wayne who was on leave, was cel­e­brat­ing his 17th wed­ding Anniversary and was called away to ser­vice . He left his beau­ti­ful wife and fam­i­ly, they would nev­er see him alive again. Gunned down by Jamaica’s urban terrorists. 

Those who lob­by on their behalf receive National Honors.

Wayne’s fam­i­ly mem­bers (center)gather to mourn their loss.These are the good guys, those who play by the rules,obey the laws and sac­ri­ficed their loved one in defense of our Nation. (pho­tos cour­tesy of nation­al forum)

Where is their National honor. 

mike beck­les:

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WAS INDEPENDENCE WORTH IT? Part 2 :

This is the sec­ond in a series of blogs I will write on the ques­tion of whether it was worth it for Jamaica to have gained its Independence from Britain, its for­mer colo­nial occupier .

The first short blog was mere­ly a ques­tion that dealt briefly with the hunger and hard­ship issue which is so much a part of dai­ly life in Jamaica, I was almost moved to tears on read­ing the com­ments of an elder­ly lady in the Jamaican Gleaner, on the occa­sion of the approach of the last hurricane.She told the on site reporter that she was only able to pur­chase a can­dle and lighter, she was unable to pur­chase a sin­gle item of food , or even a gal­lon of drink­ing water , the most basic of neces­si­ties that are required to sus­tain life dur­ing and after a nat­ur­al disaster.

This par­tic­u­lar lady touched my heart as I remem­bered the after­math of hur­ri­cane Gilbert and the des­per­a­tion that ensued, when drink­ing water was a scarce com­mod­i­ty, most of us end­ed up in Cherry gar­dens , lin­ing up in that com­mu­ni­ty, at a life sav­ing artery of water that seemed to have come out of nowhere​.It is an accept­ed real­i­ty that the very poor will always be here with us , or at least we are resigned to those realities,Jesus is report­ed in the Bible to have accept­ed those real­i­ties when he famous­ly told his dis­ci­ples quote“the poor will always be here with us ‚“end quote,but does it mean that peo­ple should go to bed with­out food, or as is in the case of this lady, fac­ing an impend­ing nat­ur­al dis­as­ter ‚should she face it with­out any sur­vival tools in place?.

You may ask , Mike what the hell does all this have to do with Jamaica’s Independence?, well, I think it is impor­tant for us to talk about these things with­in the con­text of where we were 50 years ago , as against where we are today , almost a half a cen­tu­ry after we were forced to let go of the prover­bial apron strings. I feel it is impor­tant for us to stop for a while and mea­sure the progress we have made, if any , iden­ti­fy what we did right, what we did wrong, and chart a course for­ward com­men­su­rate with the chang­ing real­i­ties of this new century.

The result of a recent study pub­lished in the Jamaica dai­ly Gleaner indi­cat­ed that a major­i­ty of Jamaicans are of the view they were bet­ter off under the Colonial dic­tates of Britain.That posi­tion has to be looked at with­in the con­text of where each indi­vid­ual is in their life ‚and the con­text in which the per­son answered the ques­tion, say for exam­ple on the press­ing issue of crime and vio­lence, it would be pre­ma­ture to jump on any­one who argue they were bet­ter off under colo­nial rule, from that perspective.

In the Old Testament the chil­dren of Israel report­ed­ly rebelled against Moses and his broth­er Aaron ‚in the desert when they had no water, even though they had wit­nessed the mir­a­cles God per­formed in order to release them from the Pharaoh’s clutch­es, they were instead guid­ed by their imme­di­ate needs , which was tan­ta­mount to , yes we saw all of that but we are humans and we have no water,The chil­dren of Israel rebelled over water , food, and every­thing they could com­plain about , and like Jamaicans of today ‚they argued they were bet­ter off under the Pharaoh’s oppres­sive rule, choos­ing to for­get hun­dreds of years of abuse in order to sat­is­fy the urgent needs of now.

Well for those of us who insist the Bible is an out­dat­ed book of fables, I am not a PhD, nei­ther am I an archeologist,not a his­to­ri­an, not even a the­olo­gian so I can present no sci­en­tif­ic data to back up my Biblical quotes, how­ev­er if you are one who scoff at Jesus freaks like me, there may still be a val­ue in the sto­ry of the chil­dren of Israel ‘trek from Egypt, to the land of Palestine , a jour­ney which should have tak­en them 11 days took them 40 year, because they kept their eyes on the past rather than embrace the prospect of the future, they even­tu­al­ly lost their way .Subsequently not one who had set out from Egypt set foot in the land of Palestine.

One does not have to sac­ri­fice his or her intel­lect or sci­en­tif­ic edu­ca­tion, in order to appre­ci­ate the sim­ple par­al­lels that are inher­ent in the two sto­ries . Until next time.

mike beck­les:

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WE IGNORE THIS AT OUR PERIL

Recent Wikileaks cables report­ed on, in Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner ‚sug­gest­ed that 84 Jamaican Nationals have been put on US ter­ror watch list.

All over social media peo­ple are putting their two cents in , mak­ing their voic­es heard , inter­est­ing­ly, most Jamaicans seem to think that the US ter­ror watch list, is a wide net, that scoops up fish, crabs, as well as old boots, there is valid­i­ty to such argu­ments, Congressmen, busi­ness­men and even babies have been blocked from board­ing air­planes because they were sup­pos­ed­ly on a watch list of sorts, right here in the United States.

It would seem that if one does not live in the United States , or does­n’t wish to trav­el there, they should not care what the Americans think. At least those are some of the sen­ti­ments on social media. The legit­i­ma­cy of those argu­ments I will not address here today , but let’s look at what the ram­i­fi­ca­tions are for Jamaica.

Two of Jamaica’s most noto­ri­ous crim­i­nal Gangs the Clans man and One order Gangs are affil­i­at­ed with the two major Political Parties in Jamaica . Last May things came to a head when mem­bers of the Security Forces stormed the Garrison of Tivoli gar­dens the redoubt of Christopher (dudus) Coke who was want­ed by the Americans on alleged Drug and Gun run­ning charges .

When the dust cleared over 70 peo­ple from that com­mu­ni­ty lost their lives, as well as a mem­bers of the Security Forces . One of the Cops who paid the ulti­mate price was a pop­u­lar Police Sargeant Wayne, Henriques ‚both the JCF and JDF were left mourn­ing their dead col­leagues who paid the ulti­mate price in defense of Jamaica.

Harkening back to the report of pos­si­ble links of Jamaicans with ter­ror­ism, the actu­al rea­son I decid­ed to write this blog .

Jamaicans run a great risk of not see­ing the for­est for the trees, irre­spec­tive of whether one like the United States is imma­te­r­i­al , Jamaicans fail to look at this bit of infor­ma­tion with fear and tre­pidi­tion at their per­il. Trinidad a Caribbean neigh­bour has Radical Muslims who have demon­strat­ed that they will use any resource at their dis­pos­al to achieve their polit­i­cal or reli­gious goal​.It is there­fore not beyond the pale to imag­ine that if Jamaican Terrorists have access to explo­sives and oth­er means of mass destruc­tion they are apt to use them and with dev­as­ta­tion consequences.

This brings us to the most recent ter­ror tac­tics that gangs have employed in recent times, that of decap­i­tat­ing their vic­tims, to some who fol­low events around the world this is a favourite method used by Taliban and Al-que­da Terrorists to send a mes­sage to their ene­mies, this strat­e­gy is designed to dri­ve fear and instill ter­ror into the hearts of dis­senters, ( wel­come to jam­rock) This heinous method of killing has been vis­it­ed on three mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty of Lauriston out­side Spanish Town.

On July 18th a 62-year-old farmer Austin George was found dead in a pool of blood in his home ‚neigh­bours had called the Police when they became sus­pi­cious after observ­ing cer­tain things that seemed out-of-place, the method of killing was report­ed­ly the same , he was alleged­ly shot, and his throat slashed.

I have no infor­ma­tion on whether these killings are relat­ed, what seem to be a com­mon thread how­ev­er is the method of killing.!

Is it ritualistic?

Is it designed to instill terror ?

Or are the crim­i­nals run­ning out of bullets?

As a for­mer street cop I am inclined to not take Jamaican crim­i­nals for grant­ed , but I am also not going to give them too much cred­it either.

Law enforce­ment has been slight­ly bet­ter since Coke’s empire was toppled,this is not to sug­gest that he was the only leader of a crim­i­nal empire there ‚far from it , in fact there are still a sig­nif­i­cant hard-core clique of crim­i­nals affil­i­at­ed and sup­port­ed by peo­ple in high places in Jamaica .

I am aware that Jamaican crim­i­nals are blood thirsty dement­ed demons, but I find it inter­est­ing that they would resort to throat cut­ting just to make a point, I believe we are wit­ness­ing some­thing impor­tant here , and I think bul­lets are becom­ing scarce , hence the beheadings.

I have been shout­ing for years to all who will lis­ten that what we have been see­ing play out on the streets of Kingston, Spanish Town, and oth­er killing fields ‚were not sim­ple acts of crim­i­nal­i­ty, but inher­ent­ly, a more sin­is­ter pat­tern of Criminality called Terror.

Under Percival Patterson’s stew­ard­ship Jamaica dete­ri­o­rat­ed to a place most Jamaicans liv­ing abroad are skep­ti­cal to vis­it, and cer­tain­ly will nev­er retire to.Through sys­tem­at­ic incompetence,and gross neglect the Island’s secu­ri­ty forces were reduced to what they were in the 1970’s under the stew­ard­ship of his men­tor Michael Manley.The secu­ri­ty forces were there in name only.Criminals were allowed to run ram­pant , all sec­tors of pub­lic life became con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed with cor­rup­tion, The Americans in the afore­men­tioned cables ‚allud­ed to this lack of will on the part of Patterson to do any­thing about the ram­pant crim­i­nal­i­ty and cor­rup­tion that was engulf­ing the country.

We now know that Patterson was too busy feath­er­ing his nest to care about what was hap­pen­ing. Most peo­ple in oth­er parts of the world would laugh if they knew these men have titles of hon­ourable and most honourable.Information from the Constabulary revealed that not a sin­gle Detective was trained for over ten years ‚under the stew­ard­ship of Percival James Patterson and his pro­tegé, Portia Simpson Miller.The total free pass giv­en to small time crooks has yield­ed dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences for Jamaica. Other fac­tors impact­ed what was hap­pen­ing on the ground in Jamaica, America was deport­ing peo­ple back to Jamaica as if there were no tomor­row, and con­tin­ue to do so, some sea­soned and dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals, as well as oth­ers who did noth­ing to deserve depor­ta­tion. Either way they all need to eat.

One deter­rent to crime, is the like­li­hood of get­ting caught. In Jamaica the like­li­hood of get­ting caught , or ever appre­hend­ed for a crime is rather slim. October 1991 I walked away from law enforce­ment , at that time we had a clear up rate of over 70 % in all major crimes, in the 20 years since I left, the JCF by its own admis­sion, only clears up about 7% per­cent of all major crimes . Seven,of that clear up rate the con­vic­tion rate is next to nill . Those who wring their hands and won­der how we got to what is now hap­pen­ing , need look no fur­ther than this para­graph for answers.

Not being held account­able for crimes embold­ened crim­i­nals who have more than enough sup­port from all quarters .

Politicians,dance hall,human rights,clergy,non gov­ern­men­tal Organizations, moth­ers girl­friends and the media to a less­er extent, the lat­ter through either fear, or incom­pe­tence, allowed itself to become pas­sive cheer­lead­ers to the carnage.

The Don cul­ture deliv­ered votes ‚the crim­i­nals in the Parliament kept the Police at bay. The Police large­ly start­ed to care less ‚and many became involved in despi­ca­ble forms of crim­i­nal­i­ty, unimag­in­able to ever asso­ciate with law enforce­ment officers.Outside groups like Amnesty International and their local pro­tegé Jamaicans for jus­tice con­tin­ue to use sub­tle coer­cion to desta­bi­lize the coun­try through a sys­tem­at­ic cam­paign of attack against the mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces, as the streets con­tin­ue to run red with the blood of inno­cent adults and children.

The European Union has made funds avail­able to Jamaicans for Justice. Under the guise of human rights, the local groups have led a sus­tained and con­cert­ed cru­sade against the secu­ri­ty forces , sup­port­ed by some with­in the JLP Administration and the entire oppo­si­tion party. 

One would think that the way for­ward would be through a sys­tem­at­ic build­ing up of the capa­bil­i­ties of the law enforce­ment appa­ra­tus, and the jus­tice sys­tem, allow­ing for the time­ly and ade­quate dis­pen­sa­tion of jus­tice. This in tan­dem with mod­ern­iza­tion of the coun­try’s infra­struc­ture and com­mu­ni­ty devel­ope­ment, that would put peo­ple to work, expand the econ­o­my, and reduce crime, which encour­ages invest­ments which in turn cre­ates more jobs.

In a coun­try of 2.7 mil­lion peo­ple we con­tin­ue to lose almost 2’000 to homi­cide annu­al­ly, oth­ers to migra­tion and it seem that the inno­cent are stuck with nowhere to go , pover­ty, igno­rance , illiteracy,hopelessness, and a rapa­cious oppor­tunis­tic polit­i­cal class that prey on their dis­ad­van­taged state.

If we do not begin to seri­ous­ly take a no-non­sense approach, that includes prison with­out parole,and deal­ing with it as a mil­i­tary mat­ter, with a mil­i­tary solu­tion ‚yes a mil­i­tary solu­tion !!, there will be no future for our coun­try ‚there are no real vic­to­ries with­out sac­ri­fice, the soon­er we as a peo­ple real­ize that the rule of law must be adhered to, and that those who defy the major­i­ty’s desire to live in a civ­i­lized way will be removed one way or anoth­er from soci­ety, the bet­ter our chances will be for a halt on the pre­cip­i­tous slide we are in.

The bleed­ing heart crim­i­nal sup­port­ing char­la­tans at Jamaicans for jus­tice who show up like ambu­lance chas­ing lawyers ‚sniff­ing around at every shoot­ing involv­ing police , look­ing for rel­e­vance, must be made to under­stand that we as a nation will not allow a lob­by group to decide when it comes to our safe­ty and secu­ri­ty, Patterson and Simpson Miller offered our coun­try up on the altar of polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy, allow­ing crim­i­nal rights to take cen­ter stage over the rights of law-abid­ing cit­i­zens, Cops who do their jobs erad­i­cat­ing ter­ror­ists from the coun­try are side­line and demo­nized ‚so that Jamaicans for jus­tice and Carolyn Gomes can receive for­eign funds and a nation­al award, on the blood of war­riors like Wayne Henriques,and all the oth­er cops and mem­bers of our nations military.

This week our coun­try has come full cir­cle we now see the trend of behead­ing take cen­ter stage. Out of shame , and fear of a back­lash, the crim­i­nal serv­ing group, Jamaicans for jus­tice, has come out in con­dem­na­tion against the grue­some behead­ings, this is what peo­ple like myself and oth­ers have been say­ing for years,” when you sup­port them they get emboldened” .

Carolyn Gomes this is now your baby, you and the talk­ing heads on tele­vi­sion, and the idlers who offer noth­ing but hot air like Perkins and oth­ers , this is your baby.

mike beck­les:

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