THE EDITOR, Sir:
JAMAICA, HAS been unable to find its way since Independence. Using 60 per cent of your national budget for debt servicing is not the way to build national prosperity. Here in the United States, the House has passed a bill to lift the embargo against Cuba, the Senate will do the same in the new term. George W. Bush has threatened to veto the bill, but he really cannot veto the bill and hope to be re-elected because the votes of the farm belt states are more than those of the ignorant Miami Cubans.
Should the embargo against Cuba be lifted, it will only be a matter of time before the Cuban economy becomes the most powerful in the region. How then will Mr. Fourth Term P.J. Patterson explain to the Jamaican people how Cuba could come out of 40 years of brutal and inhuman economic sanctions only to outperform Jamaica?
I was born in Jamaica and that gives me a say in the way my country is run. After the second world war, Japan sent out thousands of young Japanese people to Europe and America to learn technology. The motto in those days was: "Make it better, make it smaller." Japan took European and American consumer electronics apart, made them stronger, cheaper and better looking. I am not suggesting here that the Jamaican government send out thousands of Jamaicans, Jamaica is too broke. What the Jamaican government needs to do is to get Japanese manufacturers of consumer electronics to come to Jamaica under licence and make 20 per cent of their products in Jamaica, using Jamaican labour that they would train to attain Japanese quality standards. The only natural resource in Japan is coal, but they make more advanced technology products than most countries in the world.
The Japanese had the foresight to form MITI which revolutionised their industrial base. Jamaica does not have a networked industrial base, everybody is just in it for themselves. It is sad and sick to see what my country has become. If the Jamaican government cannot adequately provide for the Jamaican people, Jamaica will go through a violent revolution the like of which we have never witnessed before.
Take time out and calculate the direct and indirect taxes in Jamaica and you arrive at a staggering 114 per cent! How can you get anything done under such constraint? At least when I lived in Sweden with 65 per cent tax for the uppermost bracket, there were services provided by the government to justify it, this is lacking in Jamaica. Please wake up and smell the putrefaction before it's too late. And for God sake legalise and regulate marijuana before the Canadians beat you to it.
I am etc.,
HENRY SPENCER
spencer_henry@hotmail.com
Margate, Florida
Via Go-Jamaica
