Busha Blockhead

by John Maxwell

There are one or two important things in this life of which we must always be aware. One is that you can kill as many Haitians as you like, you can rape as many Haitians as you like, you can chop off the faces of as many Haitians as satisfies your blood lust, and you can still live like a king In Queens, New York, as long as you remember that you mustn't mess with Uncle Sam's financial system.

Not even a teensy weensy bit.

You don't have to rob Fort Knox or deprive 50,000 people of their pensions and life savings, or like Al Capone, avoid income tax. All you need to get into real trouble is to work a simple little scheme to relieve a bank of some of its surplus cash. That will get you the attention of New York's finest. You will go to jail, be fingerprinted, mug-shotted and become a person of interest to the FBI.

Cocaine trafficking? Rape, Murder? Terrorism? Crimes against humanity ? Bagatelles!!! who remembers them? But making a banker look stupid? Now that's really serious.

You're gonna swing for that. That is a crime against the Holy Greenback itself.

Emanuel Toto Constant, like Baron Savimbi of Angola, was a friend of the CIA and various Higher Powers. He had not, as far as is known, yet been invited to the White house like Savimbi but he was doing very well, thank you, as long as he confined this depredations to the Haitians, as long as his attaches with machetes, machine guns and murder in their hearts carved their bloody way through Haitian democracy with lavish fascism.

Toto, living the life in Queens, New York, just didn't know the rules.

While he danced, his President was in exile 5,000 miles away, his country's Prime Minister languishing in jail for no good reason, along with Haiti's foremost folklorist, a sexagenarian lady named Anne August, and thousands more like them are dead, or in prison, or in exile, because of the machinations and macheteros of Good Ol' Toto, friend of the CIA and Mr (Deadeye) Dick Cheney. And other friends, like Louis Jodel Chamblain and other assassins, walk freely in Haiti, shooting and chopping up as they please. One of them ran for President a few months ago.

They even have anniversary Massacres! They had one last week.

It all goes to show that, contrary to what some people believe, some of us don't have to await the Rapture; Heaven is right here on earth as long as you don't mess with the Feds.

In Haiti itself, God has at long last deigned to speak -through the American Ambassador, one Ms. Sanderson. This oracle has delivered herself of the message that perhaps Prime minister Yvon Neptun has been in jail long enough. She thought it was because of Haiti's "flawed judicial system" that he was still there, after two years without charge or trial, .

Which is strange, since it was her government which elevated the head of that same judicial system to the post of "President" of Haiti, from which eyrie he and another American carpetbagger, one Gerard La Tortue, dispatched Mr Neptun to jail.

The charade now taking place in Haiti is not a Haitian production, it is an American production, like "The Emperor Jones." In this American version of Grand Guignol theatre, an important walk-on part is played by black people who have the temerity not only to speak French but to anticipate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by 144 years. The real actors are Americans - a whole panoply of eminent fellows, steel-jawed and gimlet-eyed, full of 'resolve' - from Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, to George (the least) Bush, from William Jennings Bryan, a failed Presidential candidate, to Colin Powell, a failed Jamaican.

In their polished diplomatic phrases they all express themselves satisfied when the Haitians, the first and only people to abolish the servitude which chained them, are reduced to their proper status as less-than-people, undeserving even of even as much democracy as Iraqis or Palestinians. The Nanny-in-Chief, a failed African American named Condoleezza Rice, was quite within her rights to inform them last year that their vote was all-important. It was the most important thing they could do. Because, no matter which way they voted, they were not going to get the leader they wanted. He would have to stay in South Africa while Uncle Dick scouted the waters round Haiti for oil.

There must be oil in Haiti. Just read the CV of the latest prophetess, Ms Sanderson. Her minor qualifications seem to have been her alleged intimate involvement in the illegal detention of two dozen Algerian nationals at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay in 2002.

She completed an honors thesis, "The Arab Oil Weapon," the year before joining the State Department as a career diplomat in August 1977. She later served as the petroleum attaché to Kuwait. During the first Gulf War, Sanderson was working as economic counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Jordan

As Ambassador to Algeria she was most famous for her attitude to the arrest of 24 Algerians working for aid organisations in occupied Bosnia. They were accused of "planning terrorist attacks on the American and UK embassies in Sarajevo." Two of the men are computer programmers, while the other 22 held administrative positions in several different NGOs.

The men were detained without bail for three months before the Bosnian Supreme Court acquitted them. However, in the early morning hours on the day they were to be released, the men were hooded, shackled and taken away to an unknown destination. They wouldn't be located for over a month. Eventually they were found to be in Guantanamo Bay. After a year in custody, all 24 Algerian aid workers were released. Strangely, Miss Sanderson refused to life a finger to help their families locate them, referring them to the Algerian authorities although she must have known they were in American custody.(Thanks to Lynn Duff for this info)

During a Senate hearing in 2000, Sanderson was gung ho about the so-called drawdown programme, under which, favoured US allies are allowed to receive free of cost, unused US weaponry to control unruly trade unionists and pesky journalists, for example. "The drawdown program, like the rest of our foreign assistance program, underscores the importance we attach to [the country we give weapons to] and to our ongoing political, military and security relationship."

That connection, and her little noticed expertise in petroleum matters, suggests to me that Mr Cheney knows that there is oil off the coast of Haiti and that he wants Halliburton to retrieve it for its rightful owner, the USA. Sanderson's human rights and petroleum background would seem to fit her perfectly for this mission critical.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the slaughter goes on. It is a fair fight, with the Palestinians using their concrete schools, hospitals and power stations to damage Israeli bombs and tank-shells and employing their formidable skulls against Israeli bullets. Children's sleep patterns repel sonic booms at 4'oclock in the morning, no doubt damaging the Israeli F16s.

Mr George Bush, recognising a championship fight when he sees one, has called on both sides for restraint. He has vetoed a Security Council resolution encouraging Israel to behave herself. Not evenhanded enough.

Busha Blockhead

As I have said, ad nauseam, the ruling classes of the world, but especially in Jamaica, have no class and cannot rule. Just as the Israel rockets and shells are powerless against Palestinian civilians so are our own rulers powerless against the public they say they serve. If this were not so we would not have people like Mr Dennis Morrison whining about the all-powerful Jamaican NGOs, some of them intimidating entities boasting two women and a WMD fax machine.

These are dangerous adversaries indeed, which is why such powerless bureaucracies as the Ultimate Degradation Conglomerate (UDC) and various Ministries are forced to do good by stealth.

In the all-important race to curtain Jamaica off from its seacoast, the poor, helpless Cyclops like JAMPRO, the Ministry of Production, the Ministry of Transport, the UDC and various other enervated entities must find ways round the law, ways to evade the public's due diligence, ways to diddle the public out of its beaches, its national parks and its sadly neglected cultural assets.

The government entities are giving privileged positions on the seaside to such as the RIU hotels, who, if all goes according to form, will soon produce in Jamaica a massive scandal which will tarnish the image of the entire jamaican hotel industry. RIU hotels owns two hotels in Jamaica, forcing-houses in which tourists are processed for a few days and sent back whence they fled with nothing to show that they have been in a faraway country of which they knew nothing before coming and about which they remain blissfully ignorant after having been.

In the Dominican Republic RIU owns at least three hotels and since last year, according to several firms of English lawyers, the Financial Times and the Daily Mail, droves of English guests in RIU hotels have come down with serious and debilitating gastric afflictions.

According to Financial Times information services, quoted in the Daily Mail:

"HUNDREDS of British holidaymakers have been struck down by a severe vomiting bug at a luxury Caribbean resort - a year after an identical outbreak.

More than 200 guests have fallen ill at a five-star hotel in the Dominican Republic, which closed for five weeks in June last year to eradicate the highly contagious virus.

Many of the sick, including dozens of children, had intravenous drips hooked up in their rooms and one 18-month-old baby was hospitalised for a fortnight.

Some of the guests asked to be transferred to another hotel, but say their requests were rejected. Others were simply too ill to be moved."

But the story, judging from travelblogs, is not new: "29 year-old Nicola Piercy, from Mansfield was affected by the outbreak of the virus at the same resort in 2005 and says "I think it's absolutely disgraceful that this has happened again. I travelled to the resort in March 2005 for what I hoped would be my dream wedding and instead had to endure seeing my fiancée placed on a drip on our wedding day and most of our family including myself suffering from severe gastric symptoms.

The personal injury law firm of Pannone in Manchester, England, says "Hotels in the Dominican Republic have suffered similar problems over recent years with the Riu chain featuring in newspaper articles last year regarding complaints of poor standards of hygiene. Identical complaints are surfacing again this year as well as reports of vermin in hotel bars and restaurants, tour operator reps denying there were problems, unsupervised groups of Puerto Rican teenagers, some of whom were seen urinating in the swimming pool and medical staff treating patients without washing their hands."

If anything like this were to happen in Jamaica you know that the entire hotel industry would be shut down within a week or two. The US press would roast us, the British Press would trot out its favourite template about Trouble in Paradise and the dollar would probably be devalued.

Have the Jamaican government agencies done their due diligence? Do they really understand what is at stake?

I have my doubts.

God Speaks, Again

The founding prophetess of the Dayton Avenue Church of God has lashed out at those people in her church who informed the press and others about the case of the raped teenager. And, before we go any further, a child cannot consent to sexual intercourse, and sexual intercourse without consent is rape. I don't want to say too much about this strange and increasingly noxious case, except to point out that it is an offence to conceal knowledge of a felony, which carnal abuse is. The founder of the church should have sought legal advice before making a fool of herself in public. But she had legal advice available; her pastor is a Queen's Counsel, a former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, former High Court Judge and former Justice of the Court of Appeal. He is a bona fide member of the ruling classes.

Column originally appeared in Sunday, July 16, 2006 Jamaica observer