THE DECIMATION OF JAMAICA’S MIDDLE CLASS SINCE THE 1990’S

The middle class across the world is the backbone of a stable and wholesome society. The features of a middle class are usually that segment of the population that has a tertiary education and high rates of home ownership. It is this segment of the population that the poor class aspires to enter. The US President Barack Obama continually campaigned in 2008 that he wanted to provide ‘ladders of opportunity’ to American families to enter the middle class.

President Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore long recognized the value of the middle class to Singapore’s creation of wealth by offering them extremely low interest rates on owning a home. He said in his book “From Third World to First World – The Singapore Story” that to build the Singapore economy the country’s tertiary graduates who were studying overseas needed to come back home and not reside outside of Singapore.

To attract them back to Singapore home ownership was of fundamental importance to his government policies and he backed that up with a realistic home ownership savings plan like our National Housing Trust (NHT). The difference however is that the NHT offers mortgages that cannot fund houses for the middle class in Jamaica unlike in Singapore. It worked and Singapore today is one of the richest countries in the world. Jamaica went in the total opposite direction since 1972 in particular becoming one of the poorest countries in the world.

The middle class in Jamaica is estimated at 18% of the population and the poor class 78%. The poor class can comprise the lumpen proletariat, who Fidel Castro described as “thieves and those sort of people”, but mostly is comprised of the labouring or working classes.

It was Dr. Omar Davies who in 2002 said at a PNP party conference “the PNP has lost the middle class”. The PNP never needed them really as they have the support of the poor class predominantly and as Jamaica is a predominantly poor country the PNP has as a corollary ruled Jamaica for 28 years since independence to the JLP’s 22 years and 19 years of those 28 years have been since 1990.

Loving the poor by keeping them poor

It is the constant refrain of Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller that she loves the poor …and who could blame her it is the poor who is her everlasting base and will vote for her and her party no matter that they have pit toilets in her constituency and crime is rampant in the communities of Maxfield Park, Majesty Gardens and Greenidge Farm all in her constituency of South West St. Andrew.

Why would the PNP want to provide ‘ladders of opportunity’ to their everlasting base so that they move into the middle class? Wouldn’t that be against all logic as the PNP according to Dr. Omar Davies lost them from 2002? So it’s a winnable strategy to keep the poor impoverished so that they can be better manipulated and stir up hate in them against the ‘big man’ who is after all, according to the PNP, the reason why they are poor not that her government espouses populist policies that does not increase a country’s wealth only a country’s hate for one segment of the population against the other.

This political strategy was clearly evidenced when Peter Bunting, the PNP’s General Secretary, told the Jamaican people in the 2011 general election campaign that whilst the ‘big man’ was supporting the JLP the PNP had instead ‘people power’. The obvious inference is that money can’t buy people although in typical hypocrisy the PNP doled out money to the poor people from international gay rights lobby groups to ensure their vote at the polls.

The poor segment of the Jamaican population for the most part have no other political ideological belief than that other people must pay for their welfare. This is the political ideology of the PNP that Norman Manley would be ashamed of as his socialist philosophy was never a populist philosophy.

Populism is a political philosophy for lazy, jealous people who get by and justify their hatefulness by blaming everybody else for their state of impecuniosity, the very type of emotionalism that drives the PNP supporters with cult like fervor to the voting booths every national election.

STRENGTHEN THE MIDDLE CLASS AND BUILD JAMAICA’S WEALTH

The high interest rate policy of the 1990s that wiped out thousands of Jamaican manufacturers and entrepreneurs, implemented in the first place to soak up the excess liquidity by the PNP to buy out the Jamaican people in the 1993 general election, sealed the fate of the Jamaican economy to ‘Haitianization’ that we have never been able to recover from.

Dr. Peter Phillips was quoted by Wikileaks to have said that if the PNP were returned to office in December 2011 Jamaica would become an English speaking Haiti. He has since denied this as well as his secret memorandum of understanding with the United States authorities so surreptitiousness seems to be a character trait of his.

It is incontrovertible that Jamaica’s economy has been moribund for the last 22 quarters except for one quarter of positive growth in December 2011 and the middle class has been emigrating in significant numbers of late depleting that segment of the population and with that wholesome family values.

This is why the lumpen proletariat now is a force to be reckoned with at the polls. Stealing electricity and squatting, typical lumpen proletariat features, is now given a ‘thumbs up’ by the PNP. After all when the next election comes around the PNP won’t need a middle class to challenge them on issues and question why a government that says it wants investment prostitutes Goat islands, a protected natural reserve and violating the fundamental charter of rights to protect the Jamaican environment, and refuses to provide the resources to finish the FINSAC Commission of Enquiry report. Admittedly the JLP too turned off the middle class with the Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke fiasco, that simply stayed home on election day 29th December 2011.

But the JLP did in the end allow for the extradition of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke to face justice, which he now has, and paid a very heavy price at that. The PNP doesn’t get it that the middle class is not the enemy, poverty is, and until they understand this concept Jamaica will continue to be poorer every day and it seems the PNP will continue to have election victories.