Crime In Jamaica Part # 2:

On the 11^th of May I wrote a blog which sought to lay the foun­da­tion so we can under­stand why crime is such an entrenched prob­lem in Jamaica.
In that Article I out­lined the dif­fer­ence Hugh Lawson Shearer was as a Prime Minister when con­trast­ed with the oth­ers even in his own par­ty, the Jamaica Labor Party.
In this the age of infor­ma­tion and free­dom of infor­ma­tion laws, Shearer’s record as a leader may be accessed and scrutinized.

I will not seek to spoon-feed you guys on this. The Manley years which suc­ceed­ed Shearer is also pub­lic record for all to look at and form their own opin­ions. I for one do believe there are good and bad in almost every­thing. The ques­tion is, does the bad out-weigh the good in an endur­ing way that we would most cer­tain­ly have been bet­ter off with­out the good asso­ci­at­ed with them?
We may look at the Manley years with objec­tiv­i­ty, and feel good about min­i­mum-wage increase, no more bas­tards kids, and all the oth­er social pro­grams that he enacted.

We then com­pare them with the phe­nom­e­nal increase in crim­i­nal­i­ty and law­less­ness due to his pol­i­cy of anti-cap­i­tal­ism which taught lazy Jamaicans who want­ed what oth­ers worked for, that peo­ple who had mate­r­i­al wealth were vicious evil peo­ple. A pol­i­cy which rein­forced the notion that what they had should be tak­en from them and divid­ed up among the poor.

Manley fol­lowed up those poli­cies by telling the busi­ness class that if they did not like his socialist/​communist poli­cies they should hop onto one of the five flights per day which were leav­ing for Miami then.
Of course they took Manley’s advice, why would they not?
They were already been set up as ene­mies of the state, many were being mur­dered, so they took flight and they took their mon­ey with them.
They were not going to be vic­tims of Manley’s social engineering>.

The endur­ing lega­cy of Manley’s poli­cies rever­ber­ates through Jamaica to this day.
The coun­try which had a Ministry of (Mobilization) what­ev­er the hell that meant , has strug­gled to rede­fine itself beyond the depen­dent aggres­sive vio­lent abra­sive peo­ple we are seen as , always with a hand stretched out.
That is not to say that was the vision Manley had for the coun­try, the oppo­site is prob­a­bly clos­er to the truth. However once the prover­bial genie was let out of the bot­tle there was no putting it back.

Once oppressed and under­priv­i­leged peo­ple were allowed to move into peo­ple’s homes take them over, take over their busi­ness­es, do noth­ing but col­lect pay­checks the coun­try would nev­er be the same again.
Why would the peo­ple want anoth­er par­ty in the mix? This par­ty is great , “we do as we please, what’s not to like”?

This saw an almost mar­gin­al­iza­tion of the oth­er par­ty, which as some argue is now noth­ing more than a filler party.
A filler Party they argue which is there sole­ly to fill in when the nation is tired of the PNP. Political devel­op­ments over the last three to four decades makes it a bit dif­fi­cult to argue with those assertions.

This aggres­sive nature which was cre­at­ed by the Ministry of pro­pa­gan­da oc> (mobi­liza­tion) was not sim­ply going to dis­si­pate sim­ply because the so-called rich had fled the coun­try, after all, greed and envy ‚like all oth­er preda­tors, needs prey.

Once the rich had left the greed and envy was turned within.
Which leads us to the present crime situation.
Checkmate…