Dawn Ritch, Contributor
I CAN see that we're going to spend a good deal of time getting into the terms and conditions of agreement for the sale of JPS. And all this while the rates burn a hole in our pocket.
This must be the only country in the world where people are afraid to open their light bill. Raises upon raises granted by the public regulatory agency, increases already built into the bill, and now an increase in the charge per kilowatt hour, which never was reasonable to begin with.
OVERCHARGING CUSTOMERS
The JPS is 80 per cent owned by the U.S. Mirant Corporation, bankrupt until Jamaica started pouring money into their bank account. They were convicted in California of overcharging their customers and ordered to reimburse them. This was among a number of other charges which also stuck according to news reports, all of them about abuse of trade, federal law and customers. This is the company with a choking monopoly on the provision of light and power in Jamaica.
We have the Most Honourable Prime Minister P. J. Patterson and Andrew Young his chum, the former mayor of Atlanta to thank for this. Mr. Young introduced the company to Jamaica, no doubt pointing out that it was owned by black Americans. When black people gang up against you it sure burns holes in your pocket. Look what happens to the poor black people of Africa under the guidance of their black brothers.
Or perhaps the operations of Mirant in Jamaica, though private, are just another example of American corporate imperialism and infamy, and has nothing at all to do with race. But I think it was most certainly aided and abetted by our Government, who voluntarily negotiated such a contract with no gun at their head.
The U.S. Government accused Jamaica recently of human trafficking. Our Government had to run to their books to find out what it meant because it was a new one on them. Jamaica found itself accused of a crime it didn't even know it was committing.
At Culluden in the Prime Minister's constituency of South East Westmoreland, a regular sex fair involving the short-leasing of young girls to bars in districts islandwide has been kept up uninterrupted for at least the last ten years. Now outside thieves are discovering Bluefields and robbing the patrons in the roadside restaurants and the guest houses. The most idyllic place in Jamaica has been made derelict. There are even reports that part-time fishermen from outside the area are dynamiting the fish in the sea and leaving unexploded dynamite on Bluefields Beach. That is the Patterson legacy in his own constituency.
The rest of the country is being ground into the dust by vastly increased rates for poor, spotty and often humiliatingly-rendered public services, chief among them JPS.
It makes absolutely no sense to write either them or the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) about the size of our bills. None of it does any good. Not when the OUR always finds in favour of the utility. And not when the Mirant Corporation, reporting that they are profitable again, states this is "primarily due to regulatory approved rate increases in non-fuel tariffs at our Jamaica integrated utility in June 2004 ..." A whole island can't just be used to plug a hole like that.
PUBLIC PROTESTS
What's more, this is 2005, and public protests in four parishes tell us we're still plugging holes, not only for a wildly incompetent government, but a formerly bankrupt and still convicted foreign-based corporation in Atlanta, U.S.A. This is not an integration which pleases us mightily.
The sex trade in the Prime Minister's constituency is still going on as far as I know. Since it involves the transportation of young girls, it certainly is human trafficking. So the U.S. Government's declaration and threats have had absolutely no impact on the only known case of the problem in the island.
Powerless there, the U.S. appears disinterested in the activities of a privately-owned black U.S. corporation with a stranglehold on light and power in Jamaica. Yet that same country, purely in defence of U.S. corporate interests, went to the World Trade Organisation and destroyed the trade agreements of Jamaica banana and cane farmers. This seems more than a little two-faced to me and not at all about fair trade.
A pity, because only a fool can expect that the Government which negotiated the terms, and is only abiding by them in a timely manner, is going to be able to do anything to rein in JPS. That company was a rapacious monster long before Mirant bought it. Mirant merely grinds more and more salt into our wounds.
Nor should we waste time trying to go into the terms and conditions of the agreement because every last one of them is foul. No thought was given to a sovereign nation being a place where all classes of people live and the state having responsibility to all. A monopoly light company should either be owned by the Jamaican Government, or a consortium of Jamaican entrepreneurs and companies with a public share for good order and prosperity in the country. What took place in this divestment is shocking, and its effects are now rippling through an already fragile social fabric.
Somebody needs to take pity on Jamaica, and it won't be P. J. Patterson or George W. Bush. We're on our own with this one.
