Ian Boyne, Contributor
MY PROFESSIONAL colleague was distraught on Tuesday morning. Her daughter could not go to school that day for when my friend went to the ATM nearly 9:00 the night before, there was only $47 in her account and you can't get less than $100 from the machine. Her cheque had not been lodged, as was usually the case.
Mark you, pay day is not really before the 25th but in better times for the company, money would be lodged in the employee's account up to two days before that date. My friend was past desperate when it reached the 23rd so there was no question about waiting for the morning of the 25th to get her pay. After a tiring day at work, with school in the evening, there she was standing before the blinking ATM, frustrated and mad with the Government, her company and the whole wide world.
"Why didn't you just give the child a sandwich?" another friend asked her. "It's three months now since I last went to the supermarket. I had absolutely nothing in my house, not even sugar," she responded quickly. My friend, who is a professional I again remind you says she has a deficit of over $8,000 every month and that is living on the bare bones. She is paying back a loan to pay her child's school fees.
What about savings? I asked foolishly. "What savings you talking about you, are a mad man or what?" She explained that last month she withdrew $4,500 from the $5,000 in her credit union account to pay her rent in Vineyard Town. And she has $100 in a building society.
HIGH-PROFILE JOB
I already mentioned that she had only $47 in her bank account. That is her worth, despite her high-profile job and professional status. And, remember, she has only one child to look after. When her father was sick recently, she had to be scrounging around to find money to pay medical bills.
There are thousands of Jamaican professionals in my friend's position and worse.
The People's National Party (PNP) Government will have to work really hard to 'reconnect' with them and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) 'reformists' would have to do a whole of reforming to pry them away from cynicism. Another friend of mine who works with a financial institution where she can get loans at concessionary interest rates and who earns the handsome salary (comparatively) of $1.1 million a year cannot afford to buy ice cream for her two children on Sundays. Last week she had to get in her car to check a friend in the ghetto to do her hair free, for she could not afford the $300 being charged by the girl down the road.
She is fortunate to own her house and car, for which she is making monthly payments, but after she does and pays prep school fees, she has a deficit of over $5,000 every month. Her bank account is also empty and so is her gas tank most of the times. And she does not spend on clothes, entertainment or any luxuries whatsoever. Sometimes she can't find $50 to buy a chocolate.
When the politicians talk about 'reconnecting with the people' or the virtues of constitutional reforms, they need to think about actually existing people and the harsh choices those persons face on a day to day basis. They need to know how people live: Not just the desperately poor in the Jamaican inner cities, but the lower middle class and middle-class people who are frustrated, bitter and angry at the glass ceiling which they face every day. It's one thing to live under intense deprivation, dehumanisation in the ghetto and to see poverty and degradation all around you. To have all of your friends and companions equally poor and wretched, or even worse off than you that is 'bad and nuh too bad', as we would say. But to start climbing the social ladder; to invest in education, study hard, make enormous sacrifices and then experience the frustration of not being able to buy the things you want or to achieve some basic material comforts is extremely disconcerting.
The anger, resentment and bitterness of the middle classes is monumental in this country, and it is growing. There are lower middle-class families not just the desperately poor in the inner cities who rotate the days on which their children go to school. There are many teenagers who have to start keeping much older men because that is the only way the school fees are paid and the books are bought to escape poverty and to bring some hope.
No wonder AIDS among adolescents is so high. There are many professional women who simply can't survive and could never afford to dress well if they were kept women. The moral toll of our economic crisis is phenomenal.
There are otherwise good and faithful wives who are sleeping with other men ('Giving bun') for mainly economic reasons. Some women hate themselves for it, but they feel trapped and condemned to a life of moral compromise because of the unfavour-able economic circumstances. I can't tell you the number of lower middle class people I know who have lost their land-line phone service not because they love the higher cell phone rates, but simply because they can't keep up with the payments. What is the hope for the large numbers of Jamaicans who are simply not achieving their economic goals and who are frustrated and angry? What is the hope outside of migration?
We have been told by the apologists for the neo-liberal model that once we get the economic fundamentals right; once we eliminate the distortions in the economy, get the prices and interest rates right; privatise, maintain a competitive exchange rate, liberalise trade, open the economy as wide as possible to foreign direct investment and control the fiscal and balance of payments deficits, then we will have economic growth and create a virtuous cycle. Great.
MACROECONOMIC POLICIES
Let's make something clear. The traditional Leftist disregard for sound macroeconomic policies and the obsession with redistribution over production, which dominated economic thinking in the global Left, particularly in the 1970s, has proven to be colossally fatal to economies. You need to practice sound macroeconomic principles and you must adopt many of the features of neo-liberalism and, indeed, of the Washington Consensus to grow your economy.
But these principles by themselves will not produce development and they have to be applied very judiciously and selectively. But let us make it clear that the fiscal discipline which this Government has been preaching (and some say not practising) is non-negotiable.
But people must understand the implications of Omar Davies' plan to eliminate the fiscal deficit in a couple of years. He has been giving some hints by indicating that serious cuts are coming in the public sector.There is no way we can have drastic cuts in public sector employment without major implications for private sector employment and social stability in Jamaica. But it is not an Omar Davies' problem or a PNP Government problem. The JLP reformist or traditionalist-will have to reckon with the real world of globalisation and the drastic constraints which it imposes on all, without regard to party or ideology.
UNDER-READ
Our intelligentsia is not well read. Our politicians are under-read. Some don't even have the discipline or patience to read long articles in The Sunday Gleaner, let alone the time to read serious economic and social analyses that they should be exposing themselves to. Yet they want to lead people. Blind leading blind.Whatever you want to say about Edward Seaga and Omar Davies, you have to admit that they are readers. Small wonder many consider them arrogant as the knowledge gap between them and the people who are venturing to criticise their ideas is so wide as to provoke contemptuous disregard on their part.
As Don Robotham has been stressing this last number of weeks there are some serious economic and social challenges that face this country in the context of globalisation, and too few people in the intelligentsia and among our politicians realise the full extent of these challenges. They keep on politicising and trivialising our problems.
The JLP especially must be very careful that they do not exploit people's ignorance and merely ride on people's dissatisfaction with the PNP in an effort to regain state power. That would be a pyrrhic victory. As Robotham has been saying for all not too lazy to read, there is no pot of gold hidden anywhere or by anyone. It is not just because of PNP corruption and mismanagement why the economy is not providing the benefits which people want.
INTELLECTUAL CORRUPTION
We are too insular and provincial in Jamaica. We politicise everything. One of the gravest consequences of our political tribalism is the intellectual corruption which it fosters. Our ability to think straight and to analyse is corrupted by the political blinders we wear. Our journalists, commentators and talk-show hosts are not exempt. Who is asking whether there is likely to be light at the end of the tunnel of the neo-liberal path that we have been pursuing in Jamaica? Can the present international economic system really solve our serious economic and social problems? What are the facts indicating?
There is a deep and fundamental critique of the current development strategies being fostered by the Bretton Woods Institutions and the World Trade Organisation, and Jamaica is largely outside of that intellectual discourse as far as our media are concerned with John Maxwell, Robert Buddan, Earl Bartley and Don Robotham, being notable exceptions.
If we want to assess the fruits of the current economic policies that are fashionable commonly called the Washington Consensus get a copy of the authoritative Trade and Development Report 2003 published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). It pays particular attention to Latin America, which has been a poster child of the Washington Consensus.
Yet the neo-liberal policies have not brought the living standards improvement to the Latin American people nor, the growth they were supposed to deliver. The Trade and Develop-ment Report notes the enthusiasm with which Latin America embraced liberalisation, privatisation and neo-liberal reforms as the new panacea. Just as Jamaica is embracing it now.
"Fanaticism, according to the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, calls for the doubling of effort in the face of failure. Indeed, as inflation has subsided and market forces enjoy an increasingly freer reign, the call for developing countries to pursue greater fiscal discipline, more deregulation and ever faster liberalisation has intensified, even as growth prospects have dimmed in many places and poverty levels have risen."
The Report notes that there "is a global glut in both labour and product markets with too many goods chasing too few buyers and too many workers chasing too few jobs." Jamaicans had better realise that the diminishing employment opportunities is not accidental or due to the wickedness of Omar Davies, but is a part of this structural unemployment which globalisation has generated.
INCREASED LIBRALISATION
In a keynote paper just published in November by economist Jayato Ghosh for a labour economics conference, 'Changes in the World of Work', it is noted that "The bulk of the people across the world find themselves in more fragile and vulnerable economic circumstances in which public services have been privatised or made more expensive and therefore less accessible. Even as most economies remain in the grip of recession-counter-cyclical or expansionary macro-economic policies remain out of the reach of Governments because of a combination of fear of the power of finance and the domination of the neo-liberal economic approach."
While the Jamaican Government is being dragged headlong into increased libralisation by WTO arrangements as well as by the precepts of the Bretton Woods institutions, a well-argued paper by economist Mehdi Shafaeddin, "Free Trade or Fair Trade? How Conducive is the Present International Trade System to Development?" presented in September this year at the Development Studies Association annual conference in Glasgow says that "the failure of traditional import-substitution policies of the 1950s-1970s has been followed by the failure of trade liberalisation by the developing countries in the 1980s and the 1990s."
The pity is that these sophisticated economic analyses are not easily digested by the people whom I mentioned at the beginning of the article and they might hardly have the patience for it anyway. They are much more vulnerable to the hysterics who come along with simple solutions. Herein lies a major challenge and danger-for the country.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com.
