http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20191112/china-backlash-us-ambassador-warns-jamaica-tread-carefully-two-headed?fbclid=IwAR3d5sCh3baTvQUx-zp3BbsWNmCPcNwTEVz3qWLUcGJWsPLH-0c-0NILKMQ

Jamaica might be too small and economically fragile to stand on its own against the world. Since its independence in 1962, itt appears to have largely followed a strategy of inviting in foreign investors to run its its basic economic pillars like bauxite mining and tourism. Based on the most comprehensive research on bauxite (at least) Jamaica has benefitted less by this industry than widely expected at its onset. 

https://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/borelli02.htm

In essence, the term neocolonialism refers to the point when a nation shows the external signs of political independence yet remains economically dependent.  As Kwame Nkrumah explains, “the economic system and thus the political policy [in neo-colonies] is directed from the outside…Neocolonialism is the worst form of imperialism.  For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress” (quoted in Nicholas, 1996: 18). 

The true industrialization of the country, however, was more rooted in the plan of the U.S. to replace Britain as the dominant global power.  In the emerging worldview, free trade and foreign investment were key and Bustamante was extremely interested in the latter. In general, the leader was a strong proponent of the United States and Britain.

 “There is a sense in which Britain and America, but particularly America, formed a kind of founding myth through which the ruling class in Jamaica had imagined themselves and the Jamaica they wanted” (Persaud, 2001: 114). It is crucial to see that this “corporate colonial vision” is rooted in much ideological thought. 

“Jamaica is a black African society with a mercantile elite and a whiter-shade-of- middle class minority still inhibited by the pretensions of a white colonial plantocracy that does not even live there anymore” (Boot and Thomas, 1976: 54).

This arrangement appears to be faltering as the fossil fuels it depends on to run the international system has seemed to falter in the West but rise in China. Jamaica could be swinging strongly to the Chinese camp at5 a time when the Chinese finacial gambles appear to be slipping. And it well be time for it to develop a more balanced strategy of balancing the majow conflicting powers it depends on. 

Why is the US and preservation important to raise up at this time?

- most of diaspora Jamaicans are US citizens

- our economic resources are considerable if we decide to use them in an organized and disciplined way

- the US has tackled the problems of slavery like no other major country in the world

- points of similarity in architectural heritage--wooden buildings

- close relations needed by an English speaking neighbor with still relatively great econimic resources

- the proximity of the US tourists. 

- large number of US blacks

- for which reason, the world's leading advocate of African nationalism, spent the main part of his career there

By some estimates, the number of blacks in the US was as high as 15+%. But depending on how you do the calculation, the black population of the US is much higher than that. 

 Between 1950 and 1957 Jamaica became the world’s largest producer of bauxite.  Canadian and U.S. companies such as Alcan, Reynolds, Kaiser Bauxite, and later, Alpart, Revere and Alcoa grasped the high-grade ore.

Ironically, the bauxite industry had a severe impact on Jamaican society in many ways. First, the companies did not want to reinvest in other sectors of the economy.   They even insisted on importing equipment to be used in mining.  Second, “though exploration of open-pit mining of bauxite never employed more than 10,000 workers at any one time, it displaced thousands from rural areas and increased the burden of unemployment” (Campbell, 1987: 86).  North American investors have been persuaded with legislation that allows them to exploit small farmers in order to maximize profits.  The bauxite multi-nationals ate up the already short supply of land on the island and bought out the land of small local farmers.  In 1976 foreign capitalists had acquired more than 191,000 acres and displaced 560,000 rural Jamaicans between 1943-1970 (Campbell, 1987: 86).

Many small farmers from St. Elizabeth and St. Ann, who had been uprooted by bauxite companies, watched helplessly as the transnational bulldozed their homes and small provision grounds to take out the red dirt from the ground, sending this dirt to the sea on conveyor belts, where ships could carry it to provide jobs in the aluminum industry in Europe and North America.  (Campbell, 1987: 88)

Jamaica as the gateway to Africa--through Africa

TOURISM MIGHT NOT BE TOO HARD TO TRY

I gave hundreds of tour for a minority city in CA where my nonprofit (now defunct) operated. Some explanation on another Facebook page:

Trevor Burrowes I found my "tourists" receptive to any kind of information I offered. They respond to one's passion. They are somewhat disposed to help. Every single last peculiarity about an unfamiliar place interests them. They respond whether it's negative or positive. They kind of "read" the guide. I was opening their eyes to other realities than the stereotypes would have had them believe. There was more open space, more trees, more complex history about this low income city than the prevailing notion allowed--that it was merely an inner city ghetto full of concrete and broken glass. A scaled up program like that might have saved half of Detroit.

Garvey and St. Ann's Bay

Dear Roy (Anderson, film maker),

I'm honored to have a preview of what's to come. Thank you very much!

Please let me know when there might be something to post on the "St. Ann's Bay: Marcus Garvey History." As Eddie Seaga reinforced, Garvey was renounced in even the town of his birth. I'm trying to change that, and look forward to your film for assistance. I don't want there to be only a plaque placed on his birthplace, while the entire town's narrative is contrary to Garveyism. I want St. Ann's Bay to be a module of nation building for the United African Nation of Garvey's vision. The economic means that appears most available now is tourism, but what good is it to show tourists only a plaque on a small house and a town filled with Chinese financed McDonalds and Burger Kings?

Much love. Please keep up the great work!

Trevor

Turquoise Trail.

INCREMENTAL HURTS TO LANDSCAPE

What matters most to me are the little incremental hurts to scenic character along the Turquoise Trail. Things like sculpture right against the road to remind viewers how clever humans are, and why nature can't catch a break away from them.  Why do we need human artifacts when the natural landscape does something wonderous in terms of complexity--who could ever fathom the complex undulation of planes along the route from here to the city? Where else could we get a sense of infinite space without losing access to the infinitely small? Isn't human sculpture just a stale and limited thing by comparison? Isn't building on such land, because it's your legal right, not just a violation of nature's aesthetics--what Walt Whitman terms its "great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality"--and replacing it with a false aesthetics around the human sense of entitlement?


NOTES: TO A PRESIDENT

ALL you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages,
You have not learn'd of Nature--of the politics of Nature, you have
not learn'd the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality;
You have not seen that only such as they are for These States,
And that what is less than they, must sooner or later lift off from
These States. 

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1860, p 229. 

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AESTHTICS

Consider that aesthetics are about relationships. There might not be a distinction, as in saying it is different from that

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PAVING

We always get more paving but never less. When politicians win elections, they pave the roads where their voters live as tribute for their votes. 

I administer a few Facebook groups. The groups mainly concern three geographic areas, varied ethnically and culturally. All are somewhat in the low income category, but the one outside the US can't be compared economically with those in the US; the national economies are so different. I would categorize the US examples as bordering on the Third World, and the non US one as genuinely Third World (with the widespread delusion that it is not). But that's another issue. All these places are addicted to paving. 

July, 2019: We noticed only today what all the fuss was about.that held up traffic on the Turquoise Trail last Wednesday. They were paving the shoulders for a mile or two north of Lone Butte. As usual,  I missed any notification about this important project. While the existing roadbed was already remarkably wide, the bike lane was narrow. But now the bike lane has been widened to more than twice what it had been.

Lone Butte is around a third of the way along the scenic byway. That would make the roadbed so wide that I could picture there being two lanes in either direction. But that is only a fantasy, right? And were I a biker, I'd still be nervous with the wider lane. Will groups ride side by side so they can converse? What I would like best would be to turn the old bike lane into a gravelled lane that would tend to emphasize the distinction between car lane and bike lane. That would have been good for rain water percolation into the ground too. 

But like I say, governments don't remove paving; they only add it.

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