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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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Time
Longer Than Rope
"The duty of a leader is
to Lead"
By
John Maxwell
Nearly 50 years ago in answer to a question I
had asked him, Jamaica’s founding father, Norman Manley
replied: “The duty of a Leader is to Lead.” And, if the duty of a leader is to lead, the
duty of a government must be to govern, and government,
according to the Founding Fathers of the United States of
America, consists in securing for the people, their lives,
their liberty and their ability to pursue happiness
Doesn’t sound like much.
According to the present government of the
United States these aims may very well be
“entitlements” – pernicious guarantees and subsidies to
which ordinary people should not be entitled. They are in
effect, improper interferences with the principles laid down by
Ayn Rand – the only real virtue is selfishness; in a well
ordered world, it is every man for himself and the devil take
the women and children. Entitlements interfere with capitalist
orthodoxy; they get in the way of the market forces, distorting
reality and creating unfair advantages to poor people and
“minorities” – including women.
The English recognised in the Poor Law of six
or seven centuries ago, that societies, communities, needed to
make some provision, however meagre, for those less than
perfectly equipped for the struggle for survival. Since then,
politicians as disparate as Otto von Bismarck, Lenin, Winston
Churchill and John F. Kennedy recognised that the world is
not flat and in Kennedy’s words
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If a free society cannot help the
many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. |
Disorderly weather
Hurricanes, it seems, do not respect gated
communities.
But hurricanes tend to destroy more of the
houses of the poor than of the rich, simply because the poor
cannot afford the kinds of houses or the kinds of locations
which are safe from hurricanes.
And, in rigidly stratified societies, such as
the United States of America and Jamaica, the poor tend to be
restricted to unsafe locations, former swamps, river-beds and
similar places.
Four decades ago, John Kennedy, in his
inaugural speech, also said:
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Let [us] seek to invoke the wonders
of science instead of its terrors. Together let us
explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate
disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts
and commerce. Let both sides unite to heed in all
corners of the earth the command of Isaiah—to
"undo the heavy burdens ... and to let the
oppressed go free. |
Three decades before Kennedy, another
American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, began to rescue
the United States from its disastrous experiment with
Neanderthal capitalism. That had ended in the catastrophic Great
Depression. Roosevelt's New Deal was the basis for the
beginning of an American Welfare State. A welfare state is
simply a state in which the resources of the entire
society are employed to ensure that no member of the state
should be so economically disadvantaged that he can no longer be
considered a functioning citizen.
No matter how poor you are, Roosevelt
thought, you should still be entitled to life, liberty and the
opportunity to pursue happiness.
Roosevelt liberated the majority of the
working class of the United states. He did not however live long
enough to liberate the black working class, consigned to the
bottom since the violent conservative reaction to
Reconstruction. Part of that initiative was John F Kennedy’s
legacy to his successor, a Texan named Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Johnson was overtaken by the Civil Rights movement.
The Civil Rights movement before it was
decapitated, wanted more than the slow-moving American
consciousness was willing to concede. Between them though,
Johnson and the Civil Right movement transformed the situation
of America for blacks. Instead of slaves they became simply
sweated labour.
Even that minuscule advance was too much
for those who considered Roosevelt a Socialist and a traitor to
his class. Moreover, they had become even more powerful and
confident because of the riches they had made in the Second
World War,. They were so powerful that a Republican
President, (former General) Dwight Eisenhower, warned his
countrymen “in his final speech as President” about the
dangers of political power in the hands of the “military
industrial complex.”
Contrary to belief, capitalism is not the
same thing as free enterprise; the monopolistic tendencies built
into capitalism tend to throttle real free enterprise, producing
monsters like Exxon, Enron or Citibank, in which the surplus
value created by thousands of workers is creamed off not
by the shareholders, but by the managers who have taken control
of companies for their own benefit.
This explains why although GNP in the US has
grown considerably since 1975, the average economic benefit for
90% of Americans has remained at the same level as it was thirty
years ago. Meanwhile, the people they hired to manage their
companies have become members of an entirely different class,
even perhaps, an entirely different nation.
The average Citigroup worker, for instance,
would have to work nearly 1,400 years to earn as much as their
CEO took home last year – just under $20million. The
Aluminum Company of America, which a couple of years ago
demanded and got an “ease-up” on its taxes from the Jamaican
government, pays its present chief executive 9.6 million US
dollars annually, or nearly 400 times as much as the average
American worker in Alcoa. If applied to the Jamaican budget it
could run the entire educational system for about a month and
would pay the annual minimum
wage of several hundred thousand workers.
Companies like Alcoa and Exxon have recently
been given some enormous tax breaks by the Bush administration
– Exxon alone will reportedly pocket some $15 billion, more
than Mr. Bush promised to spend on overseas development aid
to the world’s poorest countries, for the next ten years.
Mr. Bush admits Responsibility
President George Bush has now admitted that
he is responsible for the debacle caused by the slow response of
the US federal government to the Katrina disaster on the Gulf
Coast. Although this is a welcome development and totally
unprecedented, I am not sure that Mr. Bush understands the
enormity of the charge that he has taken onto his
shoulders.
Although he maintains that race was not a
factor, every account makes it plain that race was the main
factor in the destruction of the social fabric in New Orleans.
It is clear that Michael Chertoff, head of the Homeland Security
Department and his deputy, the now resigned and discredited head
of the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], played around
with people’s lives when they should have been saving them.
Instead of decisive action there was
deliberate paper shuffling – what the Jamaican civil service
used to describe as “masterly inactivity”. Because of that,
people died unnecessarily, families were brutally separated by
unthinking functionaries and a bad situation made very much
worse.
There are volumes of evidence now on the web
and elsewhere about what went wrong and why. But the fundamental
reason is the fact that the Administration of George Bush
regarded emergency management as just another entitlement and
therefore, of no account except as a place to park idle friends.
Stories abound of essential services blocked
by arguments about who was to pay which bill; while the private
sector generally behaved as predators are expected
to. Insurance companies, for instance, have
been telling their policyholders that their houses were
destroyed not by the hurricane, for which they were insured, but
by the storm surge an entirely separate phenomenon..
One private sector hospital chain was forced
to hire helicopters from as far away as Montana, which in
Jamaican terms would be like evacuating hospitals with
helicopters hired from Brazil or Ecuador.
Mr. Bush has now promised to remake New
Orleans and the remaking has already begun, with of course, Mr.
Cheney?s company, Halliburton, at the top of the list of
indigent capitalists needing urgent public assistance.
Then there are the speculators who, like
vultures eying starving children in Ethiopia, are already
on the ground to “bags” first bite. Displaced people
are being rushed to sell their homes while they are still
disoriented and shell-shocked. A new, whiter and less 'ethnic'
New Orleans is the goal.
Mr. Bush’s decision to take responsibility
may have a deeper motive than actually acknowledging error. His
ambitious schemes to cut government down to its bare,
capital-friendly skeletal essentials depend on whether he
has enough clout to see his programmes through in the Congress.
This of course, depends on how broad his
coat-tails are – if Republicans think he has become an
albatross, they won’t pass his bills. Lacking a fault-free
occasion for posturing as in 9/11, he has to repair his image
and his ratings. Becoming a “big man” who can admit error
may be the course his handlers have advised.
This strategy may collide with an American
press newly aroused from its long slumber. Journalists have
rediscovered that they may actually represent ordinary people
and some of the most unlikely have leapt onto the
anti-Bush bandwagon with a vengeance. It helps that his poll
figures are in the basement.
And the hue and cry has produced one of my
favourite headlines ever, in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday:
“Bush plans Speech; Death toll rises”
Meanwhile, in Haiti
While Kofi Annan and George Bush were prating
about democracy at the UN a few days ago, the Haitian sub-agency
of the Bush administration made a significant announcement. In
the coming elections the nominee of the Fanmi Lavalas will not
be allowed to run. Reason: he cannot register in person. Reason?
he is in jail, Why is he in jail? Only the Shadow (or perhaps,
Mr Bush) knows?
Copyright©2005 John Maxwell
COMMON SENSE # 493
jonmax@mac.com
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great
Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a
sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi
for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin
was falsely accused of stealing a white
man's turkeys and was almost beaten to
death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling,
a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem
after learning of the grove owners'
plans to give him a "necktie party" (a
lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for
the United States Army and couldn't
operate in his own home town." Anchored
to these three stories is Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's
magnificent, extensively researched
study of the "great migration," the
exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into
the novelistic narratives of Gladney,
Starling, and Pershing settling in new
lands, building anew, and often finding
that they have not left racism behind.
The drama, poignancy, and romance of a
classic immigrant saga pervade this
book, hold the reader in its grasp, and
resonate long after the reading is done.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 17 September 2005
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