Dawn Ritch, Contributor
PRIME MINISTER P.J. Patterson was in Montego Bay three weeks ago announcing a tax incentive to Jamaican entrepreneurs for the restoration of buildings there.
In an obvious state of desperation, he said that if this didn't work only God could help us.
It is true that a similar scheme in Kingston, also and improbably administered by Dr. Vin Lawrence's Urban Development Corporation, hasn't generated much of anything here. Mr. Patterson shouldn't be calling upon God however, not from a public lectern, but with his hands clasped every night privately.
A country's prosperity and economic development ought not depend upon divine intervention; only upon the policies of the Prime Minister and his colleagues. Natural disasters are an entirely different matter.
Unless, of course, Mr. Patterson has finally recognised that Dr. Lawrence cannot help, and that the Finance Minister's mashing up of the country is on the order of a monstrous disaster. And who could disagree.
Any Finance Minister in a modern society ought to have more recourse than merely to armed policemen and closures. And indeed even Dr. Davies had regulatory powers. Nevertheless, he locked down Blaise Trust, then Century National Bank, and despite his repeated assurances that there was "no systemic problem", a domino effect was created which led to the devastation of the domestic financial sector as a whole.
The cumulative effort of these and later closures of financial institutions was to place thousands of Jamaican businesses, properties and residences under FINSAC. There is, however, an even graver social and moral issue.
The vast majority of Jamaican managers, who have had the misfortune of dealing with Dr. Davies, have been placed in a never-ending purgatory and the surrealist nightmare of FINSAC.
They have been made into financial refugees, and not given a chance to start life over. Neither to start another business, nor buy back their properties. These have instead been sold to Trinidadians, Barbadians and now it is thought even the United States Government in the sale of Crowne Plaza Hotel. And that latter sale, it is said, for the paltry sum of US$10 million.
On top of beggaring the human capital of the country, Dr. Davies as Finance Minister has therefore achieved the wholesale depreciation of Jamaican investment. No wonder the Prime Minister calls upon God.
The late Texan, John Rollins did not however, have to call upon God. All he had to do was call upon Mr. Patterson.
Mr. Rollins, an American national, lost the ownership of a huge convention hotel in Montego Bay, the Rose Hall Intercontinental, when he went bankrupt in the U.S. in the 1970s. Chase Manhattan held the mortgage for the property and foreclosed on it, and Jamaica's Urban Development Corporation bought the hotel which was operated by National Hotels and Properties Limited, a Government agency. When Mr. Rollins got back on his feet in the 1980s, he wanted back the hotel and even caused the U.S. Congress to delay aid to Jamaica because the Seaga Government would not comply.
Sweetheart deal
Mr. Patterson didn't take the position in the early 1990s that Mr. Rollins ought not to own hotels in Jamaica anymore. Far from it. Mr. Patterson promptly gave him a sweetheart deal on Rose Hall property which became the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
Mr. Rollins was an American. Compare this administration's treatment of him therefore, with that of their own people. They are relentlessly vindictive towards us, unless we are members of, or connected to, the "Twenty-One Families" who have traditionally owned most of the country anyway. This Government makes billionaires out of a lawyer while it persecutes Jamaican entrepreneurs, and pursues them with legal action all over the globe.
These entrepreneurs were guilty of one mistake only. Ambition. They borrowed a little money and ended up owing trillions. Courtesy of state madness in sustained high interest rates. Jamaica, with the exception of Brazil's overnight rates of 80 per cent, had the highest interest rates on the planet for a decade. On average, as Opposition Spokesman on Finance, Audley Shaw, pointed out in the House of Parliament, more than seven times as high as the U.S., Canada or the United Kingdom. Only Trinidad came close to us, and our interest rates were still three and a half times greater than theirs. No wonder Trinidad can afford to buy Jamaica.
Let us understand exactly who is being haunted by FINSAC. They are the people who without a family name succeeded in the past. These are the Jamaicans who are not being allowed to start over again.
Mr. Patterson said, almost as an afterthought, that God only helps those who help themselves. He told MoBay entrepreneurs therefore to take up his tax incentives for urban renewal.
Who is going to lend them the money? The administrator of the programme Dr. Vin Lawrence and the UDC? Or is it FINSAC? And who is going to shop in these restorations? What is going to generate the sales to pay back the loan? What is going up to generate the sales to pay back the loan? The "Lift up Jamaica" brigade of resurrected shovel-leaners?
If Mr. Patterson was not merely taking the Lord's name in vain, let him facilitate the recovery of proven Jamaican producers. A city cannot be renewed without people to do it.
When the U.S. Federal Reserve Board kept afloat the bankrupt private company Long Term Capital Management in the giant hedge fund failure of 1998, they didn't consign the management to the trash can. The U.S. Government told them that they could start a new fund, and they did, and investors are putting money in. And all this as reported in a recent issue of Newsweek magazine.
Not only the late John Rollins, but also the very much alive Donald Trump went from rags to riches to rags and riches again. The first black Prime Minister of Jamaica will however, give a foreign white man a break, or members of the Twenty-One Families, but not his own black people. He and others in his administration nevertheless parade themselves as Blackists.
Greed
Let the record show therefore that Blackists have no ethnic sensitivity whatsoever, only rhetoric. Greed knows no colour. The philosophy they have spread about is that black people don't need to be willing to work and to be honest. That was colonialism. Today money just "let off".
Thus in the middle of silted-up reservoirs, the hottest summer in 50 years, and punishing water lock-offs, Mr. Patterson is busy making comrades and Labourites plant grass on the South Camp Road medians, and trees along the sides of Duke Street and in National Heroes Park.
And this pointless largesse to political supporters while all must forget we ever heard the names Mountain View and Windward Roads, because of on-going violent outbreaks and slaughters there. Whenever we want to go to the airport we must henceforth drive only on South Camp Road and the new highway, unsurprisingly to be known as the Michael Manley Boulevard.
We are crows living on the carrion of failure, said one of the fattest to me. Civil society is under attack. All is persecution and curfew. Envy has been let loose like a plague.
