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“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Late US president John F Kennedy.
This quote comes from Kennedy’s inaugural 1961 address. He had been gripped by the poverty he saw while campaigning. In his first official act, he issued an Executive Order to provide more food aid for needy families.
By 1970, Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote a paper: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.
This paper influenced politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It set the tone for a generation of business leaders. It gave rise to a doctrine called ‘neo-liberalism,’ which informed how global multilateral institutions ran their affairs.
Here in Trinidad, we experienced it with the intervention of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in late 1987. The solutions adopted recommended structural reforms—trade liberalisation and privatisation, etc—that increased the role of market forces.
Those recommendations came with the power of the carrot of immediate financial help.
Anything outside of the company was someone else’s problem. That someone else was the government or the disadvantaged people themselves.
This approach differs from what another Nobel Prize laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, espoused. He argued: “A well-functioning economy requires a balance between the public and private sectors, with essential public investments and an adequately funded social protection system.”
This context makes it fascinating to compare the responses of our business chambers to the 2024 Mid-Year Review and their reaction of horror and dissatisfaction to the bloody weekend of 13 – 14 July 2024.
In the former, the emphasis was on getting more of the available foreign exchange with little comment on crime or its sources. Mr Rampersad Sieuraj, director of the Confederation of Regional Business Chambers (CRBC), griped and agitated for the immediate operationalisation of the Revenue Authority (TTRA), emphasising audits on the very wealthy in society.
He noted: “…there are 30 to 40 per cent of uncollected taxes whilst the compliant taxpayers are burdened with additional taxes. This is grossly unfair.”
In essence, he was focused on tax parity between businesses but did not appear to have considered the impact of tax evasion by companies on the less advantaged citizens.
We now know that particular business leaders have not paid taxes for years. The sum is estimated to be in the region of $15 billion.
While it is not right to expose the individual taxpayers, one notes that there has been a careless approach to paying taxes. The poor employee cannot do the same.
Even The University of The West Indies’ economists did not identify crime as an issue that should be treated in the Mid-Year Review. They were focused on Minister Imbert’s continued spending.
Even though leading business figures had been present at the then-Commissioner of Police Gary Griffith’s 2019 Christmas party, the Chamber’s January 2020 press release on crime did not mention the problems he identified (Express, 30 December 2019).
“More firearms are entering the country, but we expect the homicide rate to be reduced. More persons are getting access to easy bail, but we expect the homicide rate to be reduced.
“When we arrest these persons, and they get into prison, they still have access to call hits on persons, but we expect the homicide rate to reduce. The police service did all we could have done.”
Photo: AP Photo/ David Goldman
Was this statement from Mr Griffith merely a defensive position in response to criticism? Or was it an honest assessment?
If this assertion was factual in 2019, why do we believe that rising crime is the fault of incompetence by Police Commissioner Erla Harewood-Christopher?
Questions had been asked about Mr Griffith’s choice of guests. Some guests were charged with rape, sedition, serious indecency, and corruption. His rationale was that such questions were petty.
At the time, Duke was before the courts for rape.
Was it acceptable to our business leaders to rub shoulders with such guests? In a comment about Boysie Singh and our elites, it was said that we possessed a “popular ambivalence towards crime”. (Bickerton, 2020)
As the Mighty Cypher sang in 1989: “If the priest could play, who is we?” Are our exemplars setting the proper examples?
Was the Chamber’s 2020 press release timed to deflect? It came three weeks later and spoke of a crime crisis! Where was the crisis when they chose to party with the then-Police Commissioner? What did they tell him over the drinks?
(via TTPS)
It is an open secret that prominent chamber personalities were the lead funders of the shadowy “I Support Our Service”—designed to provide supplementary funds to the Police Service.
(Incidentally, has anyone heard of an accounting for that fund? How did it align with the funding rules for what is designed to be an independent institution?)
The Chamber’s press release suggested using “other arms of the security infrastructure” in “high-crime” areas. This suggestion ignored the killing of five Laventille men by the police and the advice of Christlyn Moore and Wayne Sturge.
Both men along with a passenger were gunned down moments later by police officers on 27 June 2020.
Have the business chambers ever commented on the judicial conclusion of the Piarco Airport case in Miami? On 30 March 2023, a Miami jury awarded the government more than US$100 million in compensatory damages.
Other corruption cases involving the political and business elites are still going through the court system. The common thread is the vast sums of money and high public officials’ involvement.
Is corruption not perceived in the same light as violent crime?
Guys can pick the nation’s pocket with impunity, and few words are spoken. The young black man who uses a gun makes the headlines. Do we not see the link between corruption and the weapon used to kill?
When the country is robbed of funds, the less well-off families struggle to raise healthy, well-balanced children. This situation gives rise to crime.
Kiran Maharaj, the chamber president, recently lamented: “The civil society organisations work on the ground… they too have ideas. But I am not seeing the kind of round table discussions to deal with this [crime] situation.”
Newsflash! David Abdulah of the People’s Roundtable hosted such an event where Deputy Director of the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) Michelle Solomon-Baksh identified a gaping resource hole:
“We have to be able to detect the perpetrators and develop the supporting evidence to put them away.”
Ms Maharaj added: “The members are very disgruntled; some want to reinvest in their country but are apprehensive about it because, at the end of the day, they don’t feel safe.”
Is it that other citizens feel safe? What is causing the unhappiness?
There are more questions than answers, but we do not dare question business people. They are the movers and shakers of our fragile economy. Or so we are trained to believe.
One of the root causes of crime is that our business class refuses to admit that the obsession with maximising profit causes much pain at the economic, educational, and health levels.
In 2019, 181 CEOs of the US Business Roundtable committed “to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders”.
Ours persists with the Friedman doctrine. Let us examine their commitment to what was called their Corporate Social Responsibility budget. Let us look at how they live as responsible citizens in the community where their businesses are located.
We will choose to ignore Singing Sandra’s Die With My Dignity at our own peril.
How will crime decrease when you feel no obligation to the communities where you profit? How will crime cease when mothers are mere feed for the money mill? Who takes care of the children?
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My good sir; my sentiments exactly. You have hit the nail on “its proverbial head”.