In Black America; The Honorary Michael N. Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica

떁 떁 떁 From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. I will confess that in the case of the general, I can understand the invitation. It is a source of great pride to you and to Austin, Jamaica, that he should now occupy

the highest position in military establishment of this country. And I must say that when you invited him, I also thought that for you to have him here must have been involved in a certain sense of intelligent precaution. And I can understand why Dan Abbott is here, my good friend, because Dan is a member of one of the most powerful parliaments in the world and she is unique in the sense that she comes from a former colony to be no part of the apparatus of the former colonizer. But in my own case, I could not really believe that there was any special importance. And then I remembered the fact that Jamaica is busily colonizing New York.

And then all of a sudden I was in the midst of revelation. The honorable Michael Norman Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, in 1952 Prime Minister Manley first entered politics when he was elected to the National Executive Council of the People's National Party. He was appointed to the Senate the Upper House of Parliament from 1962 to 1967 and was elected to the House of Representatives of the Lower House in 1967. In 1972 Prime Minister Manley led his People's National Party to a landslide at the Toro Victory of the Jamaica Labor Party to become the country's 4th Prime Minister. This past summer Prime Minister Michael N. Manley spoke before the National Organization of National Association of Black Journalists, 14th National Conference held in New York City. I'm Johnny O. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America.

This week the honorable Michael Norman Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, in Black America. And what you will discover is quite simple that Jamaica is the greatest vacation destination in the world. You will discover that we are dynamic, we have problems, but we have more dynamic than problems. You will discover that we have a lively investment climate. I confounded them all when after my reelection our stock market continues to boom to unprecedented heights.

That has given cause for a lot of people to think. And if there are any of you who, by the way, have investment in clinicians, I can't say I feel free because it isn't for free, but it can be very rewarding. Jamaica is a country very few working class African-Americans know much about. It is located in the West Indies in the Greater Antilles. The island was formerly a British colony. It is estimated that as many as one million Jamaicans nearly half the number living in home lived in the United States in another 50,000 or so visit each year. Yet there is little contact or coming together of African-Americans and Caribbean people. On the other side of the equation, though the number of African-Americans worth the English speaking Caribbean population of 6 million people, very little has been done to establish business times and mutually beneficial contacts between the two groups of African migrants.

Although tourism remains Jamaica's main foreign exchange earner, some have suggested that their marketing seems to overlook to 20 million African-Americans. Moreover there are few business deals between black owned businesses separated by a few hundred miles of ocean and very little cultural educational links such as summer exchange, internships, touring theater groups, just to name a few. This past summer the honorable Michael N. Mallie addressed the National Membership of the National Association of Black Journalists, 14th National Conference, held in New York City. Prime Minister Mallie focused on the International Drug War, which Jamaica has to offer in terms of recreation and commerce and also the great visionaries the country has produced. The honorable Michael N. Mallie, Prime Minister of Jamaica. You might wonder why I have a perhaps a special feeling about this occasion. And may I remind you that I and all my colleagues who are here come from the country that gave to the world, to the black world and to the whole world one of the great figures

of our history, Marcus Mazargab. And if you come from Jamaica that is one of the definitive realities in your background, the man who more than any other summoned us all to pride and achievement. It is of special interest to us of course because Garvey began his great mission in Jamaica. Built the UNIA till it had chapters in so many parts of the world, but in many ways did some of the most significant work that he did right here in the United States of America. And therefore it is from that background that my mind is filled with memory tonight of Garvey's mission under the fact that you are now building this tremendous organization.

One is very conscious of Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King who in a sense was an heir to Garvey's tradition. And the first thing that is in my mind as I speak to you is the hope that you out of your history of struggle, some of you may be too young even to understand that struggle. You never find yourselves in the position where the objective demands of journalism deprive you of that in a passion of the heart for justice. You apply your trade at the heart of the greatest concentration of power ever known in the history

of mankind in this country. And when you are at the center of power it can be easy to forget those who are not at the center of power. And I will tell you frankly that we in a little country like Jamaica always cherish the hope that black America will remember its own struggle and will find a way by identifying with our struggle in smaller countries by the recollection of your own. We cannot ask you to take up what they used to call cudges for us. And we cannot ask you to remember what it is like to be part of a disadvantaged section of humanity. Because remember that in history there are always two areas in which there is contradiction.

Actually there is the area of authority and liberty. Without authority there is no stability, there can be no continuity. But without liberty there can be no change. And why is change important because of a second contradiction in our experience? And it is to do with the way that economics work. In our human history economics have always tended as they build greater and greater prosperity, greater and greater productive power, they always tend to produce some who benefit and some who get left behind. And without liberty those who get left behind have no chance of making their own way and of changing things.

And therefore I am always very conscious of this thing of authority which is power and liberty which is people's drive for freedom and how that relates to the thing we call social justice. And it is in that context that one thinks especially of the work of Gabi and of King. But I wonder how many of us realize that when you buy the average car today it has probably been made in at least 27 countries. I wonder how many of you realize that in today's world increasingly world trading is dominated not so much by nations as by multinational corporations. And I do not quarrel with this because he who quarrels with technology is a fool. He who tries to turn technology back is really irrelevant. What we need to do is to understand where technology is taking us, to make sure that technology never runs the people that the people always find the way to run technology.

And so we are trying in a little country like Jamaica to understand what this new thing means to understand where we can fit into a global economy. But the funny thing that as technology increases productive power, efficiency, the capacity to produce goods on an unprecedented scale in the world. As technology has created the capacity, we are ready to see that every human being could live well. That every child could have an education. That every sick person could be tended to. Yet as we move from the nation in which you had problems, from the nation of South Africa that has problems into a more and more global economy, we still have the problem of

those who benefit and those who get left behind. They are still there as a challenge to our conscience. I would not have the courage to go through the whole subject with you tonight because then I will keep you from the fashion show which is going to be far more entertaining than me. And so let me just, would you allow me to just pick two things, which illustrate the problems, some of the problems that we face and how I think we have to learn to tackle them now that we no longer really can believe that each of us is in a corner that we call our nation. And you are a big corner that you call a big nation, but that we really are all part of what they now call a global village.

Allow me to speak to you of debt, third world debt and drugs, just two examples. Many of you in this room have been taught to believe that third world debt arose because a bunch of lazy guys couldn't bother work hard, sound familiar, you ever heard that in your own country? I bet you have. So you are led to believe this simplicity, that a bunch of incompetent people out there, if not corrupt, just decided to run up debts and now because we are factless and shipless, maybe a little bit like shuffling sound, we don't want to pay the debt back. And I don't doubt that's true of some countries.

Some countries have been corrupt, some have been brutal, some have been tyrannical, but most have not, country like my country, it really made up a very proud and hardworking people. It was made up of people who have been through a lot of pain in history, never lost our sense of humor, never lost our courage, never lost our resilience. And yet we are in debt. How did we get into debt? We got into debt because history worked in a certain way that left us with very deformed economies, economies that were very dependent on importing almost everything that we needed and having to export a few little things like sugar that we produced. And always what we had to import costs more and not very often did what we exported, bring more.

So we had a problem. And then when in the 1970s the tremendous problem of post Vietnam inflation created huge pressures on the world economy. And the oil producing countries hit back the way they knew, which was to charge more for oil, then the whole world economy fell into a turmoil. The world we knew fell apart. I remember being a novice prime minister at the time, and I didn't show how I got there. But all of a sudden, everything I'd ever read about economics disappeared. And we're trying to deal with a whole new world that nobody really understood. And I'll tell you how my country got into debt. When I looked at my hospitals and didn't know where to get the foreign exchange to maintain the levels of antibiotics, that a choice, let the people die, no big thing, or borrow the money to bring in the antibiotics. I make no apology to God our history borrowed the money and brought in the antibiotics.

And this is just typical of a whole burgeoning set of pressures that began to overwhelm third world countries. And as the pressures rose, of course, the money market tightened, where you could get 8% money, all of a sudden it was 12% money, where you could get 12-year money, it was 7-year money. And I don't know how many of you have ever financed homes and know the difference between it, your 8% money and 12% money. Do you know anything about that? And so before you could turn around, the whole third world was in debt. Some of it, because I repeat, of bad management, I don't pretend that we manage everything. Well, maybe we're too inexperienced to know how to manage all of it. But we try it.

But let me tell you what it means to us. When we get our earnings from sugar and tourism and box site and alumina and our manufacturing and our bananas and our coffee, and I help with that as a little coffee farmer myself, one of the secret weapons of the Jamaican foreign exchange earning capability, my mighty 50 acres of coffee. When you add all that up together, one half of it goes straight back out to pay interest and sinking fund on the debt. So as you look at the dollar that you've earned with a lot of sweat and effort, now what is coming back with which you can buy tractors from Detroit, or cars, or the heart, meat of America, or drugs or anything else, you're running a country on a 50 cent dollar and you want to try that sometime. You raise the taxes from the people and you are deeply conscious of the need to develop

your education because without the education you can't have your country ready for the 21st century. We live in a technological age. Every year, the demands upon national skill grow greater, the demands on your mastery of chemistry, of physics, of biochemistry, of understanding, computers, these are the indispensable of survival in the modern world and they require intense investment in education. But what you have left for your education, your health, your roads and everything else is also half of your tax dollar. So you're running your external country on 50 cents and your internal country on 50 cents. Now what's the effect on you? Because what very often happens in this country is people say that's your problem and of course it's my problem.

But what you don't realize is that it's your problem. Right now Detroit is struggling to survive partly because I can't find the foreign exchange to buy as many tractors as I would like. Now that's a fact. In fact, let me give you some quick statistics about that. I have a marvelous research department and I don't always understand what they produce for me and I have to put on my glasses to read it anyway. But one key thing of the figures they produce for me, I thought I'd share with you. If what is now being paid by the third world to service debt was reduced by 50 percent and we'll come to that. They would be able to increase their imports by 7 percent, put another 2 percent on their annual growth capacity and the industrial countries the experts calculate would increase their exports by 6 percent and the United States it is calculated could increase its exports

by 30 percent. Those are figures part taken from bodies like the World Bank. And you are the most in debt country in the world but you have other ways of surviving that dilemma not available to us and all of us are trapped in a common insanity in which we will not deal with the debt problem. How do we deal with it? Very quickly. We believe very strongly that if you're going to deal with the debt problem, the first thing that you have to understand is it cannot be dealt with country by country. If you try to deal with the debt problem, Mexico today, Venezuela tomorrow, Jamaica the day after, you are now caught in a problem so fast. It cannot be handled that way because the debt problem is so huge that what you need to do is to take a fundamental step of reorganizing the load of debt in a way that respects and

protects the rights of banks, respects and protects the rights of lending countries and gives borrowing countries a chance to breathe and once again become a part of a growing world economy. There will be no solution to debt if people do not come out of their current intellectual paralysis and agree first of all to sit down and have an international conference about it because only an international conference can look at the thing in its global perspective and take it out of a sort of misapplied ethic of, I pay my debts. My country pays its debts, we've never defaulted and we never will. But meantime my children are not getting properly educated and meantime while I have to pursue

the ethic of perfect repayment, I can buy your tractors. So I mean where is the sense in being trapped by old ideas into a common futility for you and me? The time for new thinking has come, more thinking has to begin by recognizing that that thing out there may look like a set of nations, it is not. It is increasingly a global international economy. Only an international conference could set up the kind of institution that could deal with debt, we're proposed an international debt organization, only an international conference could create new instruments that could enable the banks to be protected, the donor countries and the borrowers. We have an idea where you could use a debt bond under international sponsorship and where that debt bond could hold out for the bank, a very interesting prospect.

Not no banks have by law and contract a right to a certain rate of repayment within a certain period of time and the problem is they can't collect it because those who are borrowed from them can't meet the schedule, they just can't meet the schedule. Why don't we have a sensible trade-off in which a debt bond can be substituted for what is on the books as the formal debt that has longer repayment periods, absolute security because it is internationally backed and is substituting certain but lower and slower return for a theoretical return that nobody can collect. It is a kind of imagination that the world needs at this time, but in response to conscience and more importantly in response to common sense. To know some countries by this, your own country does not.

I respect what Mr. Baker tried to do, I respect what Mr. Brady is now trying to do. Can I not ask you not to be a vice of conscience but to be a vice of common sense in the interests of all humanity? And I end with drugs. I'm going to confess to you, Mr. President, my passion, your word, my passion about drug struggle is rekindled every time I look at my eight-year-old son. Every time I look at my fifteen-year-old daughter, ask myself what kind of world do I want you to live in.

And I will know one thing, I don't want my children to have to survive in a drug culture. I look at my country and I don't know what future there is for my country if it's security forces can be corrupted or killed, if it's judges have to live in terror and if the whole basis of civil authority and social ethics can be undermined. I am not aware of any reading that I have had that tells me how such a country can be built. And the fact is that we are not even fently and longer dealing with national problems in drugs. We suffer from community problems with drugs. We suffer from children problems with drugs. And what is behind it is the most massive, ruthless and vicious criminal conspiracy

in the history of mankind. The illusion that drugs is something that a couple places in Colombia are pushing is dangerous. You are dealing with an internationalization of marijuana, cocaine and heroin. You are dealing with people who are so ruthless that up here yesterday they killed the chief of police of Colombia. The honorable Michael and Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica. If you have a question or comment about this program, write us. Remember views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. We're in Black America's technical producer Cliff Hargrove. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr., please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black

America cassettes. Longhorn Radio Network. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr., join me this week on in Black America. And the fact is that we are not even mentally and along, dealing with national problems in drugs.

We suffer from community problems. The honorable Michael Norman Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica this week on in Black America.