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“If you don’t have unity, we can’t fight. There are fresh people who call themselves leaders. You can’t be leading, and when it’s time to stand up for people, you don’t know how to stand up.
“The authorities have to take crime-fighting seriously; otherwise, there would be more chaos and murders. All 41 of them are in Parliament, but it seems nobody is serious about what is happening in the country.
(via Newsday)
“About 90% of the deaths are among the lower-income people, so why should politicians worry? People who live in hotspots work for minimum wage, and lower-income earners are among the hardest hit.
“Why care if you are earning $80,000 per month plus perks, compared to a CEPEP worker who is getting $1,000 a month…” Sea Lots resident. (Express, 25 July 2024.)
This profound wisdom may be overlooked by some readers who would focus on the allegation that the deceased Sea Lots resident wielded a cutlass at the police officer. But we never answer why there are still no body cameras worn in such police interventions.
We accept that allegation and pay no store to the perceptive issues raised.
Chaos is the opposite of peace. Murders are the result.
On 7 February 2024, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in his briefing to the General Assembly meeting, said: “As polarization deepens and human rights are trampled, peace within communities is undermined. As inequalities explode, peace with justice is shattered.
“[…] People want peace and security. People want peace and dignity.”
The Gaza Strip has been likened to an open air prison.
Why is there acceptance of this situation of unequal treatment?
Bartels (2005) found that political partisanship and lack of information explain this issue. We have been brainwashed. We have been taught to believe that all residents in East Port of Spain are criminals waiting to rob us. They should be exterminated like cockroaches.
The elites do not care about social programmes like health care and social security programmes. Check their annual national budget recommendations. Safety and prosperity will not come amid chaos.
(via CNC3)
The elites are super focused on what their agenda is. The Unfortunates have two significant drawbacks: they are not united, nor do they truly understand where they are on the totem pole of wealth.
Gimpelson and Treisman (2018) compared respondents’ self-placement in the income distribution with their actual position. They found that, generally, people tend to think of themselves in the middle of the distribution: the rich usually underestimate their position, while the poor overestimate it.
The rich are shadowy: they are not often seen where the masses are. Yet, since the mid-70s, they have manufactured ideology to protect themselves.
The business elites engage in ‘feedback’ to the political elites. This action can be more effective than electoral politics. It shapes the political discourse and future policies. The perceptual distortion causes the low-income and middle-class population to accept causes and arguments harmful to their interests.
The super-focused rich have battalions of advisors and networks to preserve their wealth. There was an astonishing story about the sitting Integrity Commission chair that hardly created a ripple in commentary.
Chairman Hayden Gittens’ picture, CV and the fact that he is the Integrity Commission chairman are reportedly printed on an ad for the Solis Initial Public Offering.
Photo: Office of the President
The Executive Chair of Solis is a past president of the Chamber of Commerce and a former country managing partner of a leading audit firm. A context-free description of a pre-appointment conversation with our nation’s president is offered as his justification for being a ‘mentor’ to the private company.
Did Solis’ Executive Chair’s career not inform her that this stance is untenable? Was the network self-reinforcing with disregard for the values and needs of our nation?
Gittens argues for his right to perform part-time jobs while holding his institutional position of trust. He quotes Jamaica’s rules about the need for a mentor in IPOs. But he skips past the insistence in Jamaica that Don Webhy had to resign and not take pay from GraceKennedy when he took up a government position in 2007.
“[…] Although the critics did not question Wehby’s integrity, they suggested that he should sever all ties with GraceKennedy…”
Gittens insists that there is no conflict of interest. He may mean: I have no interest in the conflict!
Sadly, all the other elites, unlike the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica, will remain silent. Trust in our institutions gets further eroded. Who cares?
Definitely not our politicians. Why do they not care about the people who live in hotspots who work for minimum wage? Why do they not care about Mr Gittens and his part-time job? Campaign financing is the cause!
In 1986, when Desmond Carty uttered, “All ah we tief”, several of us interpreted it as a PNM confession of corruption. No. It was a confession about the parliamentarians of every stripe. Partisanship blinds us.
From Johnny O’Halloran to Calder Hart to the current matters in the High Court, politicians and their lackeys on both sides colluded with corporations to leverage personal interests at the country’s expense.
In an ironic twist similar to the assessment of the Sea Lots residents, O’Halloran’s neighbours said, “He’s a good guy… helps everybody.”
Former Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Teshiera admitted to the Colman Commission that Harry Harinarine and the Hindu Credit Union (HCU) helped to fund her election campaign in 2007. Having been appointed, she alleges that former Prime Minister Patrick Manning asked her “to try to help” the then-struggling HCU.
She insists that she did not help and that the campaign support did not necessarily require a payback. The HCU went into liquidation in 2009.
The reality?
In 2009, the late Dennis Pantin spoke about entrepreneurial politics, which he described as people investing in political parties from which they get payback.
He said: “One of the things that facilitates this is an opaque system where you do not know where the money is coming from, but then you see a certain pattern of decision-making in terms of the award of contracts in a particular construction of a contract, which seems to be going to particular people over and over.”
His observation was borne out in the battle between two UNC supporters, as “the lawsuit by Real Time Systems Ltd (RTSL) owned by UNC financier Krishna Lalla against Austin Jack Warner opened a rare and revealing window into the seedy world of politicians and political investors.”
Super Industrial Services Ltd (SIS), a sister company of RTSL, received over half a billion dollars in lucrative government contracts plus the $1.6 billion Beetham Water Recycling Plant project.
Lalla still seeks over $70 million in repayment from Warner and affiliate companies. Those tentacles reached into Tobago and are reputed to be still present in the political scene there.
(Copyright AP Photo/ Shirley Bahadur)
Why study who from Sea Lots gets killed? To be elected, the politicians take money from the business elites for campaign advertising and reward them with contracts or policy decisions.
The sad part is that the Unfortunates fund those political decisions via taxes and unstinting political support. The promising part is that some, like the quoted Sea Lots resident, are now calling out the politicians and other elites.
The planters of injustice will reap disaster, and their reign of terror will come to an end. (Proverbs 22: 8).
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“All 41 of them are in Parliament, but it seems nobody is serious about what is happening in the country.”
I do not accept that nobody is serious about what is happening in the country.
I firmly believe that they do not know what to do about what is happening in the country, and unfortunately, they doh know that they doh know!