Activism and Advocacy in Montego Bay

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

~Rebecca Solnit

True advocacy is born from culture, not technology or marketing.

~Jay Baer

Activism and advocacy are words that aren’t too big (as every other week somebody tells me I write with too many “big” words). They are often used interchangeably, and while their meanings and definitions do overlap, they are distinct and different concepts. An activist is a person who makes an intentional action to bring about social or political change. Samuel Sharpe was an activist who challenged the slavery systems in Jamaica which culminated in the Christmas Rebellion. Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who challenged racial segregation in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a bus for a white man. An advocate, on the other hand, is one who speaks on behalf of another person or group. Shaggy is a Goodwill Ambassador of sorts who uses his talent and fame to advocate for the Children’s hospital. Activism, in a general sense, is intentional action to bring about social change, political change, economic justice, or environmental well being. This action is in support of, or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument.

Now, what does all that have to do with Montego Bay? I’ll get to that shortly but I want to give more clarity to the word “activism” as it is often used describes protest or dissent, but activism can stem from any number of political orientations and take a wide range of forms, from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism (such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing preferred businesses), rallies, blogging and street marches, strikes, both work stoppages and hunger strikes, or even guerrilla tactics. An advocate can also be involved in controversial activities or issues, but because they are speaking on behalf of a group, they tend to be more likely to follow the paths of lobbying and legislation.

Is there activism in Montego Bay? Yes… especially the political kind, with councillors in the municipal corporation lobbying for political points. But that isn’t the kind I am talking about today. I am talking about activism and advocacy in the social and economic sphere. The brand of activism that tries to impact lives and uplift communities. Activism increases people’s confidence in making a difference, it improves governmental quality and leaders’/leadership accountability, it is the spark of extra-governmental change and many times throughout history it has revealed the immorality of laws like for instance the Civil Rights Era.

Activism has played a major role in ending slavery, challenging dictatorships, protecting workers from exploitation, protecting the environment, promoting equality for women, opposing racism, and many other important issues. Activism can also be used for aims such as attacking minorities or promoting war. Activism has been present throughout history, in every sort of political system. Yet it has never received the same sort of attention from historians as conventional politics, with its attention to rulers, wars, elections, and empires. Activists are typically challengers to policies and practices, trying to achieve a social goal, not to obtain power themselves. Much activism operates behind the scenes.

There are many varieties of activism, from the face-to-face conversations to massive protests, from principled behaviour to the unscrupulous, from polite requests to objectionable interference, and from peaceful protests to violent attacks.

Activism in Jamaica can be a pretty unglamorous thing, owing sometimes to apathy and funding. Me, personally I am an advocate for my community, Paradise and Norwood, for Open source, for Linux, for socialism, for pan-Africanism, for Rastafari, for senior citizens and youth. On any given Sunday I can be found at Rastafari Coral Gardens Benevolent Society (RCGBS) meetings, Residents Association meetings, Youth Club meetings or about some other community-oriented issue. The world of activism can sometimes be a slow and boring place, of talk, talk, talk, paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, letters to the editor, press releases, sponsorship letters and more letters. Movement and change can be slow, but I have found these places are the only place meaningful social change occurs. The RCGBS is the most meaningful vector of change within the pan African community in western Jamaica, with the success of the Prime Minister’s apology to its belt. The Paradise Youth Club, when it was most robust and had the full attention of my sistren Venise Samuels, it was the most unifying factor in the community and gave us the biggest community sports day, and most importantly a sense of hope.

Most inspiring to me though is the Senior Citizens Association, who of all the groups is an all women cast. Why I find them, most inspiring, is because I didn’t realize how much they had been doing within the community. They semi-adopt kids and sponsor some their schooling, keep prayers at all the nurseries, entering art and craft competitions, being apart of a bigger national Senior citizens body, etc. For some reason, all this blew my mind in a small way. For one it escaped my notice, and two it really hit me that most of the women in it, had in some real way given their lives to community and here and now at a ripe old age, in a day and age that can seem monstrous beyond belief, there was a cabal of women, the “gentler” of our species, at the frailest time of their lives, defying odds and convention and opposing the ugliness of modernity. If that isn’t activism and heroism I don’t know what is.

What I do know is… people are becoming better educated and less acquiescent to authority, and therefore better able to judge when systems are not working and willing to take action themselves. Today's political systems of representative government are themselves the outcome of previous activism. If these systems were fully responsive to everyone's needs, there would be no need for activism, but this possibility seems remote. For political systems to co-opt activism, activism would need to become part of the system, with techniques such as strikes, boycotts, and sit-ins becoming part of the normal political process - a prospect as radical today as voting was in the 1700s. When that happens, we can anticipate that new forms of activism will arise, challenging the injustices of whatever system is in place.

So who are you today? Are you advocate or activist? If any? You can advocate on behalf of a small group or large group and make a significant impact as one single person. Remember that you alone can make a difference.

About the author: Yannick Nesta Pessoa B.A. is Jamaica’s first blogger, a Social/Community Activist and Law Student at Utech Western Jamaica. Follow on Twitter at @yahnyk. Reply to yannickpessoa@gmail.com

A Mansion to Mention: The Holness House is a Hot Mess!

As elections draw nigh it seems the JLP wants a debate, but no one wants to debate the hottest issue; Mr. Holness' house. Is it because it could prove Mr. Holness to be a scammer of sorts!

I can understand the JLP's suspicion of bad-mind on the part of the PNP... but does bad-mind prevent the question from being a really legitimate one? I think not! Why shouldn't a public official tell us how he acquired such costly material possessions? Should we live with the shades of doubt as to his funding source and mode of land acquisition?

Andrew's lacks confidence and it is clear and apparent. He makes attempts to seem larger than life and charismatic dusting his Clarkes but he generally strikes me as sterile, rigid, academic and lacking natural cultural affinity.

Now this alleged fashion in which his land acquisition was carried out moves the discussion into the domain of the disingenuous, insincerity and intellectual dishonesty, framing his party negatively before the election.

Should the allegations in the barrage of articles that are flooding my FaceBook be remotely true... then one must question the intention of the formation of the St. Lucian company of which Mr. Holness is the director!

1. Why was a foreign company used to acquire property in Jamaica, his home country, where consequently he is an elected official?

2. How could transaction be allegedly signed stating “while visiting Jamaica”?

3. Are the above questions indicative of his attempt to evade his financial obligations (the paying of taxes) to is homeland?

4. Now if the above questions speak truth of his dishonesty and it may very well be that he is in above his head, then how does he plan to satiate his appetite for affluence and penchant for avarice?

5. Would it be via gaining control of the country’s fiduciary and financial systems?
FINALLY could this grand fraud be a personality trait and character flaw... could the man lacking in confidence be using big house to mask his timid ego and insecurity, could lack of strong self esteem have lead to a need to prove self and commit the fraud!

Dear readers and Montegonians,

We (The Montegonian) are an independent, ad-free multimedia and multiple media news platform that serves hundreds of viewers each month. Our news product is special because we make it our priority to go where the silence is. We put a spotlight on corporate and government abuses of power and lift up the stories of ordinary people working to make change in extraordinary times. We do all of this with just a nano fraction of the budget and staff of a commercial media enitities. We do it without ads, corporate sponsorship or government funding. How is this possible? Only with your support. If every visitor to this site posts, comments, submits story ideas, article ideas, general info, community notices etc for Western Jamaica in 2014. Pretty exciting, right? Please do your part today. It takes just a couple of minutes to make sure that The Montegonian is there for you and everybody else in 2014!

A we seh #MontegoBay!

A we seh #MoBay!

Minister of Freakonomics: Lisa Hanna!

How Can a Youth Minister Support Abortion?

May, Child's month not even fully a month behind us, and our Minister of Youth is endorsing eliminating youth... it seems somewhat absurd, if not paradoxical.

This reality reveals much of what is wrong with public policy discourse in modern Jamaia. Our politicians lack character, insight and vision, that is why they will endlessly regurgitate white America's intellectual drivel. A 10 minute Google would have shown our dear Minister of Freakonomics that the abortion-cut-crime theory has not even come close to meeting the burden of proof, but, instead, she like a lot of  our nation's intelligentsia fell inlove with the theories perpetuated in the book Freakonomics by Donohue and Levitt. Being innumerate, most politicians, presstitutes and the punditariat are willing to dupe the proletariat, the masses. It is easier to simply engage in intellectual yes-man-ship and take a guru figure like Levitt on faith, than even ask a local statistician or economist. A few book reviewers, like James Q. Wilson (America's leading expert on crime for several decades), expressed deep skepticism about the books propositions.

It amazes me that in todays day and age, an influential person such as our Minister publicly endorsed the theory, when a bit of diligence with Google would have shown her it was dubious, if not racist and prejudice.

It is an attention-grabbing theory, to be sure, possibly even more noteworthy than recent research indicating that liberalizing abortion increased pre-marital sex, increased out-of-wedlock births, reduced adoptions and ended so-called shotgun marriages.

But a thorough analysis of abortion and crime statistics leads to the opposite 

conclusion: that abortion increases crime.

There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term.

A theory such as the one by Ms. Hanna has far reaching social, political and moral implications and, as such, needs to be rigorously debated and researched. The intent of this letter is to illustrate that, although the abortion-crime theory gained much attention and popularity in the United States, Donohue and Levitt’s findings are not apparent and obvious, nor are they indisputable, hence ought not to be taken as fact.

The criticism of the book's conclusions need to be given as much attention and consideration as the findings and arguments originally put forward in the book. Indeed, much of the research done after Donohue and Levitt’s study was published disproves the abortion-crime theory and casts serious doubt on whether such a link exists at all. Since then several times in articles, Donohue and Levitt acknowledge that a number of factors may have contributed to the falling rates crime rates during the 1990s. So why do we follow blindly American schools of thought?

Indeed many in the academic community contend that Donahue and Levitt’s research suffered from methodological flaws. As The Economist noted, “Donohue and Levitt did not run the test that they thought they had.” Work by two economists at the Boston Federal Reserve, Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, found that, when the test was run correctly, it indicated that abortion actually increases violent crime. John Whitley and I had written an earlier study that found a similar connection between abortion and murder — namely, that legalizing abortion raised the murder rate, on average, by about 7 percent.

We need to be doing our own research and not slavishly following North American trends of thought.

Who Protects Brand Montego Bay?

Brand Montego: Part 1

The City has to Develop and Protect it's Brand

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. Jeff Bezos

“There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible.”
A. Alfred Taubman

Imagine the words Montego Bay, instantaneously it brings to mind, relaxation, coconut and palm trees, white sand beaches, sun and sometimes even sex - it's one of the most powerful images in the Caribbean. So how is it, dozens of companies use the name to sell products – Payless is notorious for selling a brand of sandals called the Montego Bay Club, there is even a foreign band full of white boys called Montego Bay Band, A Freemason pub of some sort in England with the Name Montego Bay littering the menu- so I put it to both the government and the public now, that we start considering seeking protection for Brand Montego Bay, under intellectual property, through trademark and copyright.

Freemasons Arms Pub... on the Menu Montego Bay Chicken Wrap!

We must consider that in today’s environment cities compete amongst each other for talent, business and human resources. In many ways they have to act like commercial entities by selling themselves to potential customers – business investors, visitors/tourists, the working and creative classes– as successful, vibrant, forward-looking brands. Simply put they have to market themselves as the place to be, project an image of tomorrow and betterment. At the same time that image, that name, that identity must be guarded. Just as commercial entities, have lawyers and make legal cases on issues of copyright and trademark infringement. So too must local government and even central government entities now seek to protect the Brand Montego Bay and Brands of Jamaica.

How do a group of white boys in America or is it England become the Montego Bay Band?

Intellectual property rules offer the potential to provide a valuable source of income for people in developing countries, who tend to get only a small sliver of the profits made on their goods on the international market. Do we profit from made in China T-Shirts that say Montego Bay. NOPE! Montegonians are not getting value. Their image and name is being abused. Consequently I saw a study that detail through study of Mobay and other areas, how Brand Jamaica has mostly benefited entities like Puma, whilst craft vendors and small businesses flailing in the harsh economy.

Montego Bay City must re-examine its role and function, as well as define its appeal to ‘citizens/consumers’, at the same time protecting the name and the Brand of the city for the citizens. Our city must distinguish itself from our competitors (Kingston, Portmore, Ocho Rios) and position our self as a recognizable brand in an increasingly regional and international market place. Port of Spain, San Fernando, Bridgetown, Kingstown are all Caribbean cities vying for status and international cosmopolitan appeal, so what of us in the Bay?

I noted on twitter that a few Kingstonians started noticing that “Mobay look like farrin” and that “any time mi waan go farrin mi go Fairview, Montego Bay.”

Here is an excerpt of Mobay through a foreigners eyes

“Downtown resembled a cross between America and what we would picture as rural Africa. The streets were full of activity. People yelling, laughing, buying and selling items. Playing music. Their skin was black as tar and beautiful. Their hair was the epitome of natural. They wore clothes that we would have worn in the early 2000’s but did their best to match it up.”

From instagram.com (via @RudeboyRJ) - June 3, 4:05 PM

What is the vision of Mobay, what is the vision for Montego Bay, who protects the name Montego Bay? The name Montego Bay has been already been branded and used and bandied about like there is no tomorrow, but Montegonians haven't seen the benefits.

I put it out there that Montego Bay is the biggest cultural brand in the Caribbean. When I travel abroad, Montego Bay always seems to be the more popular Jamaican destination and known location. So those companies using the Montego Bay Brand in ways that really do enhance their business, they use the name to make association with luxury, comfort, sun, breeze and such... so it's reasonable for the Montegonians to ask, Why aren't you coming to talk to us? Why aren't you asking our permission? Why don't you engage with us?

The notion of cities and cultures seeking IP protection is not an entirely new one - the Native American Navajo recently brought a case against the clothes company Urban Outfitters, for use of their name.

Relying on past glory is no longer enough; As the once den like, homely Montego Bay is now becoming a metropolis and showing a citizenry acquiring the cosmopolitan lifestyles to go with it… the friendly city is now a big city, and nowhere near as friendly as it used to be. 

Today, successful companies and young talented people have lost hometown loyalties; note the influx of outsiders and outside businesses in Mobay, not to mention the ‘Spanish Invasion’. They can choose where to cluster. Cities with distinctive characteristics; be they economic, cultural, environmental or life style, and it these things that will attract the best companies and people. So now we have questions of Montego Bay’s identity and its brand identity: What are the distinctive characteristics of Montego Bay, what makes us, US?


To Be Cont’d

On Anti-heterosexuality, Anti-hetero-pathy & Heterophobia: The Unpopular Intellectual Opinion!

As the Rowdy Gays saga continues... I have seen the gay community saying The Jamaica Observer is being vindictive, for publishing the address of where the gay men had been squatting. The media's prime objective in reporting is to answer the 5 W's who, what, WHERE, why and when. I will admit the first published article leaned on some bias as is indicated by tone and choice of words, but the writer never truly crossed any line in journalistic integrity. I don't want to seem insensitive or rude on the issue but... are we now to toby to the whims of unscrupulous gay men and wards who violate the law by squatting, by being rowdy and soliciting or eliciting media attention by attacking the media. 

I say the gay community has let prejudice, colour its judgement in hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo/blue and violet. The colors of J-flag has shrink wrapped the brains of many in our national and diaspora's intelligentsia... and to oppose the homosexual lobby is to be unpopular and court the life of a pariah.
I am pro-tolerance and never promote harm to humanity, but I disapprove of homosexuality and feel a sincere attempt to shut up, lock off, label, libel and slander any intelligent opinion that does not agree with homosexuality as antiquated, draconian, non-progressive or not with the progressive liberal agenda... dunce... outdated and overly or unnecessarily militant. Is there a polite way to just say no to homosexuality! Once you show any dissent on homosexuality you are branded ’homophobic.’ While these accusation do not fill me with indignation, I know they are an inaccurate description of what I do, who I am, or how I think.

This sudden groundswell of Anti-heterosexuality, Anti-hetero-pathy, Heterophobia, Anti-hetero-philia... would seem as if they are in the process of being consecrated into an ideology. If your straight shut up. Our have no right to free speech straight people... shut up... u can have no legitimate grouse against homosexuals! The terms “homophobic” and "homophobia" are usually used by the Gay Activists and Lobby Group to discredit and inaccurately define its critics. Once someone is branded homophobic, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised gay pride and ego.

But what do the terms “homophobic” and "homophobia" mean? Do they mean you are anti-music or Elton John or Luther Vandross? Or that you’re opposed to freedom of choice? That you don’t delight in listening to Diana King (whom I love dearly, I listen to her version of "Say a Little Prayer" ritually) or Freddie Mercury (everyone in Jamaica sings "Another one bites the dust)? That you have a quarrel with Shebada? Does it mean that you don’t admire the positive work of hundreds of thousands of possibly and notably gay persons who have contributed positively to the advance of humanity? Does it mean that you hate gay people? Truth be told it does not. One can disapprove of smoking and not hate the smoker, one can disapprove of homosexuality and not hate a homosexual and not be homophobic.

It is a conflation to try and say that every time someone disapproves of homosexuality or every act or event that went unfavorably for the homosexual community was or is based in homophobia. It is not just a conflation but borders on intellectual dishonesty. It is also most crucially a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the group mind, the institutionalized Gay Lobby, international establishment has set out. If you’re not homosexual you’re a homophobic. If you don’t love us, you hate us. If you’re
not Good, you’re Evil. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.

There is this fancy attempt by the gay community to sanitize its image by projecting only the successful productive ones amongst them and distancing and disassociating itself from the so called "screbbe screbbe" ones. So that it would appear to most that gay is taste acquired by affluence or education and open mindedness, or it would be, as it is rumored Rex Nettleford once told an ironically rowdy student, whom as the case maybe  had opted to verbally abuse him as "B---Man" to which he replied, "Yes it is an intellectual disease you'll never catch!"

If one faithfully followed common homosexual propaganda you'd think all homosexuals were artsy, cultured, tech savvy, swanky sophisticated people, soft gentile people, limp wristed folk... living high above poverty in aloof safety sipping wine and nibbling cheese smoking long cigarettes at fancy shin digs...

The homosexual PR propoganda machine is well oil, lubed even and working.

If it had been GUNMEN hiding over there... The headline would probably have read "Residents call police on gunmen squatting uptown," or "Squatting Gunmen attack reporter"... If it had been RASTAS squatting there the news would probably read "Fanatical RASTA squatters attack Journalist," So why is it because they are GAY SQUATTERS we must sshhhhhhhhhhhhhh doah seh the squatters dem gay... The only reason is that it makes GAY LOOK BAD!

Sooner or later this madness has to stop.

OBSERVER ARTICLE: Unruly Gays

Montegonian Editorial Exclusive: Jamaica, Black Leadership and the Future!

It's been almost one year since Jamaica 50 and sometimes I wonder have we forgotten who we are as a people and has the media forgotten who we are! 

There was a time when PanAfricanism was ripe in the island, with the likes of Walter Rodney and Rastafari played a role as the memory of the people, when people remembered their Africaness. There was a time when Michael Manley was in dialogue with Kwame Nkruma and Julius Nyrere. 

Oh come on, for goodness sake! We were a people that inspired Haile Selassie to come here, a man so revered he was on the cover of Time several times and featured in the national geographic and is even spoken of highly still today in modern literature such as Robert Greene's Strategies of War and Laws of Power, as well as Wings to Freedom by and Indian Yogi named Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath. Jamaicans are a people that inspired Nelson Mandela to come here. We produced Marcus Garvey one of the greatest black icons and PanAfricanist of all times. We produced Bob Marley who not only the world loved but Africans.

So why is it then that as Africa is now being looted and plundered by Europe and America, commercially colonized by China with a renewed 21st century thrust... Why is no one speaking out about it? Europeans are streaming into northwest Africa en masse, the huge U.S. airlift capacity may soon be necessary to keep the “Crusaders” supplied and the military industrial complex oiled and firing. African militaries are being cobbled to do the Caucasian’s bidding. 

The U.S. has almost practically establish a Somalia-like operation on the near side of Africa – with Americans at the helm. A sentiment echoed by even republican politician in the states Ron Paul who said "U.S. Action in Mali is Another Undeclared War".

All this while in America itself under the Obama administration the plight of Black Americans has worsened:  A recent interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press,” NAACP CEO and president, Ben Jealous, told the show’s host that black Americans “are doing far worse” than when President Obama first took office. “The country’s back to pretty much where it was when this president started,” Jealous told show host David Gregory. “White people in this country are doing a bit better. Black people are doing far worse.”  Dr. Julianne Malveaux of Your Black World recently wrote that the Obama Administration needs to speak out more about existing racial disparities and persistent problems in black unemployment.

The Black Diaspora has seen the US elect thousands of African American local and state officials and re-elect the first black president. But Obama seems to have proven just a symbol, symbolic and nothing more. Nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing progressive as it pertains to the plight of blacks.

The media is slow and unwilling to note that our black leaders are dithering. Floundering. Flailing... failing and falling even. Symbolism supersedes the fact that black leadership has few or no victories to boast for the seventies, the eighties, the nineties or the new century, apart from their own illustrious careers. 

No black leader is man enough to speak to or look at the fact that the war on drugs and the prison state sprung up in north America. The symbol of Obama over rides the fact that black unemployment remains at record levels, that US wages have not risen in thirty years and that the first black president apparently forgot his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour almost as soon as he made it. And what has been done for the Caribbean? Nothing. He continues an illegal international embargo on Cuba, he continues Gitmo torture in our territory, and turned down our request to exonerate Jamaica's hero and Rastafari Icon Marcus Garvey. 

Obama seems a symbol used to nullify and quiet the analytic black mind and voice. "Nigger shut up we got a black president now!" 1 black President... and 10 million  black persons still suffering. And let us not examine his neglect of his black family in Kenya, or his brother that lives in a Shanty Town.

Who in Jamaica or the media is willing to look past the fact that he is JUST a black president and willing to examine the fact that the black role model president conducts weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the White House basement at which he dispatches drones to murder and special forces to kidnap and torture in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and across the African continent. It matters not at all that the First Lady is a poster girl for Wal-Mart, attacking child weight, rather than bolstering education, that the Department of Justice prosecutes whistle blowers instead of war criminals, or that black military and diplomats like Susan Rice are up to their armpits in African blood.

The black political class at home and abroad is utterly self-interested. It cannot begin to mobilize black communities to demand higher wages, a massive jobs program to relieve unemployment, a new paradigm of urban economic development that isn't just moving poor people out of neighborhoods and richer ones in. It seems our egotistical black intelligentsia can't begin to make these things happen because foisting itself and its own advancement off as “representing” the black oppressed masses is the beginning and the end of who they are and what they do. They are not truly about the black diaspora and its plight, they do not truly care to ease the existential condition of his brothers, neighbours and friends.

For them, the election and and re-election of Barack Obama is the end of black history. The be all and end all of our history. Addressing black unemployment, pervasive economic injustice, opposing the neo-liberal,capitalist, globalist, transnational agenda of privatization and austerity put forth not just by the black president, but by an entire layer of black thinkers are, in their language not pragmatic or “realistic.”

So if our black leaders have anything to say about it, more years of Barack Obama means more years of black silence and irrelevance on the issues that matter most to our communities; on jobs and economic injustice. It means black leadership will wring its hands and do nothing as American federal policies drive the militarization of Africa. Our politicians will continue to philander and spinelessly acquiesce to whatever old might Uncle Sam says, we will genuflect at his very whim. We will not be the bold humans, bold leaders that stood down injustice and untruths in the past we will be the bandwagonists of a new age much to our demise!

Mello FM Making Waves from Montego Bay!

As media in western Jamaica becomes a force to be reckoned with!

Montegonian Toons

Montegonian Editorial Exclusive: POLITICIANS CRIMINALISING JAMAICANS

The atrophy of socialism, social welfare, the welfare state and the growth of the penal state represent a double criminalization of poverty. Criminalising Survival, Vending, Hustling, Small Businesses, Corner Shops, Street Life Street People Street Hustling... Street children might not be securely lodged in the life-patterns that the middle class impose on young people, but their reward from trying to maintain a minimum standard of living that their parents and governments are unable to provide them is infinitely preferable to living in the absolute poverty that surrounds them, yet police and state will incarcerate them... in juvenile centres and later on in life in BIG PRISON... We know there is a Marginalised Black male, A lack of opportunity, a lack of education, a lack of funds and lack of land and access to it. We born in Jamaica and then they say you are a squatter, "wah mi supposed to do, born and float above the ground, since me cannot get any plot of land via birth right. rent an existence forever"

The government needs to stop seeing the people as a mass of cattle for culling taxes and revenue! The poor appear to be just another commodity, good, product... to be speculated, traded and profited from by the gang of bankers and political cronies

This folly continues by using a stance on Weed and drugs as an excuse to systematically incarcerate even non-violent youth. Black religious expression and such is facing serious repression. while court houses and tax office are cash collectors. They take much and give us so little.

The transition from welfare to taxfare and the proliferation of young bodies behind bars taken together work to marginalize Jamaica's black poor population, with an economy forcing them out of Jobs and no public aid, on the one side, and holding them under lock, on the other, and eventually pushing them into the peripheral [and deeply precarious] sectors of the labor market and farther on the road to poverty

We don't live in a direct or indirect democracy, in reality. We live in a police state, controlled by oligarchic forces, a two head serpent. The heads of state lack the will to HELP people out of poverty. instead we have generation that go from Cradle to Prison...

 This country is based on slavery and land grabs by a small plantocrasy. Had they been decent people, to begin with this plantation class would have asked for permission to share this land with the Tainos and or Arawaks. Instead, through force and genocide they took the land and resources and divided them up, as they did again after emancipendence, when they divided the land and this country among the descendants of slave masters and the indentured labourers and buffer classes, just as we do now by letting the wealthy determine the laws and by making slaves of the have-nots, through debt and financial slavery and usury.

If Jamaica is ever to be fixed... land reform, education reform, energy reform, economic  and spiritual reform are now absolutely necessary!

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