Behind the music on a very popular Montegonian: Jimmy Cliff

Jimmy Cliff was born James Chambers on April's Fool's Day, 1948 in the Somerton District of St. James near Montego Bay, Jamaica. He reputedly chose the stage name Cliff to reflect the heights he intended to scale in the music business. And while he belatedly became a household name in the 1970s - in the UK thanks mainly to his appearance in The Harder They Come both as an actor and a singer - it became clear to those who followed his career that his name actually came to represent artistic, political and personal struggle, rather than easily attained commercial success. 

When he was 14 years old he moved to Kingston...

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My Daughter and I listen to this song every morn... she even sings it to herself... it's off his latest Grammy winning album! Another good hit is "Took the children's bread and give to the dogs!

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!

Baphomet in Montego Bay

Look out for ruler and the compass...

Babylon can't take me fi nuh punk Ras...

Illuminati...

Cyah hold di Natty...

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A Mobay Morn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaligJJkR8Q&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1

Mobay United Schedule

Sun 05/05/13 Montego Bay United vs Cavalier 3 : 30 

Sun 12/05/13 Montego Bay United vs Sporting Central 3 : 30

The Montegonian: The Wall of Jericho: A Tale of Sons and Fathers

The Montegonian: The Wall of Jericho: A Tale of Sons and Fathers: The Wall of Jericho: A Tale of Sons and Fathers by Yannick Nesta Pessoa Greetings once again Montegonians, were live again from the battlefi...

The Montegonian: Hurricane Dean or Hurricane Portia: Not changing n...

The Montegonian: Hurricane Dean or Hurricane Portia: Not changing n...: Don't mind my use of the double negative yes Yannick does have a better grasp and command of the English language than you so you don&#3...

Government Double Tax Calls!

It seems odd to me that since call rates have gone down on both the LIME and Digicel networks, the Government of Jamaica has adopted a cess of 40 cents per minute for both local and international calls! Why isn't the Office of the Utilities Regulation, Fair Trading Commission, or anyone else raising alarm about it?

To me, it is a serious matter. As I understand it, we already pay taxes when we buy phonecards. Why are we being double-taxed? How will this benefit us in business and interregional communication?

Is the Government's plan to tax us out of existence by making the cost of living so high that we opt out of living or simply starve to death?

This is why people will always look for loopholes to get around the system!

YANNICK PESSOA
yannickpessoa@yahoo.com

Are We Independent? Montegonian Exclusive

AFTER 50 years, we have not really released our vestiges of the Crown in England. Granted, Mrs Simpson Miller has made the gesture towards a break with the Crown, but I cannot help but feel it is just political talk, pandering to the public. We still have a representative of the Queen as an influential part of the state, the governor general. We still have British ceremonials in Parliament, we still have appeals to the British courts. We are a part of their Commonwealth, we still have the remnants of their laws. Are we really independent of England?

After our recent return to the International Monetary Fund and our leaders begging on a world tour, are we financially independent? Our money is printed in mints in England and is backed by debt and United States dollars, which is losing its footing as world currency. How can one really say we are independent? What are we celebrating this 50th anniversary?

How are we independent when we are slaves to the foreign media, especially the 'mighty' Uncle Sam? We are dependent on imports from the USA; we depend on their food, their clothes, even their entertainment.

How are we independent when we subscribe to the neoliberalist policies of globalisation that insist on lessening the powers and sovereignty of the state, and the continuous breakdown of international barriers? How are we independent when foreigners own our electrical supplies, our airports, our mining plants? What are we independent of?

Bound by handcuffs

Are we not bound by so many handcuffs of ever-growing poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, crime, men-women inequality, limited technology and, worst of all, which result in other bounding forces too - corruption?

In the word of Kahlil Gibran ... "Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine press. Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block. Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking. Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting, and farewells him with hooting, only to welcome another with trumpeting again. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation."

Yannick Pessoa
YannickPessoa@yahoo.com