Should you wish to evaluate the management ethic and the rarefied
aesthetic values of those who manage the Jamaican bauxite industry you
need go no further than Roxburgh, a spot quite near the geographic
center of the country and which happens to be an important place in
Jamaican history.
Roxburgh, which used to be a place of tranquility and peace, of big
old guangos and expansive views in all directions of the rolling green
hills of Manchester, is now fatally composed of bauxite. On Melrose
Hill, before the turn off to Roxburgh to the south there once was a
ravine cut through meters of solid bauxite, dark red, like living
flesh, frozen.
At Roxburgh, off the beaten track like most other bauxitic
obscenities, the Jamaica Bauxite Institute (J.B.I.), the Commissioner
Of Mines and Geology (C.M.G.), the mining companies and the Jamaican
bauxite workers have combined to create a s
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There is a sense of economic crisis in Britain as the recession
looms. Such crisis moments tend to re-mold "common sense" ideas, with
many orthodox economic assumptions proving highly vulnerable to
revision in the wake of last autumn's financial meltdown. So could
Britain's determination to remain outside the eurozone be the next
orthodoxy to fail? It was an idea floated in the midst of the financial
crisis by Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg premier and head of the
Eurogroup of finance ministers, who was reported as saying that
circumstances might prompt Britain to rethink its policy. Commission
President Jose Manuel Barroso has since repeated the idea. Looked at in
political terms, how likely does this prospect seem?