View Point

“The disproportionate prosecution of working class criminals ultimately serves to maintain ruling-class power and to reinforce ruling class ideology—thus performing ‘ideological functions’ for the ruling class.” Orson Rogers considers potential flaws in the way that Trinidad and Tobago deals with crime: As an armchair crime watcher and based on considerable …

Hear ye, hear ye, O people of the babagreen—I cyar really say “grassroots” no more since in most places the grass cut and covered over with Bestcrete or pitch. Anyway, leh mih make mih point. The point is that ting happening and, Sherma Wilson, forgive me for calling your name …

“The Media, at least the traditional mainstream part of it, is not a clear glass window, giving an unobstructed view into the society; it is rather, a lens. It can serve to focus and direct public attention to specific areas of national life and equally, to obscure or obfuscate other …

The Judicial and Legal Services Commission (JLSC) blundered when it appointed Mrs Marcia Ayers-Caesar to the office of a Judge of the High Court. At the time of the JLSC’s decision to appoint her, Mrs Ayers-Caesar was the Chief Magistrate and had a list of unfinished cases before her. One …

“It is often the case though that persons in leadership positions disclaim accountability and responsibility: the school Principal claims she can’t lead her school because it is ‘really the Ministry’ who is in charge; the Public Service Commission claims it can’t do anything, because it is ‘really the Director of …

“WHERE $60,000,000 of public funds was misappropriated and the movement of those monies was facilitated even unknowingly by a particular politically connected financial banking institution, there are questions to be publicly raised and satisfactorily answered… “Shockingly but not surprisingly, what is being presented to citizens at this time is an …

“MATT remains deeply troubled that the Cybercrime Bill has retained its potential to criminalise professional journalists working in the public interest. “While MATT follows the argument that the redrafted Clause 8 of the Cybercrime Bill introduces layers of proof—intentionally, without lawful excuse, justification—to be satisfied by a complainant in order …

To say it’s sad to learn about the significant amount of students who over the years have “dropped out of school” is an understatement. To further learn that the primary reason behind the dropout rate is financial hardship—known in most circles simply as poverty—is depressing. When it becomes downright asinine …

“[…] Most of the times when we hire locals they usually stay with us for very short periods and then we are short staffed once more and have to get other workers on short notice. The foreign workers however stay with us longer. Despite their bad behaviour at times, the …

The current Government has fatally underestimated the resistance to the proposed property tax. If it does not make concessions on the methodology of its introduction and of its implementation, the property tax will become a poll tax when it leads to defeat at the polls. Of course, much of the …

The latest round of appointments to the High Court bench and the ensuing fiasco raises the urgent need to find a constitutional mechanism to hold the Judicial and Legal Service Commission accountable. Steps must be taken with a far less leisurely timetable than the one recently suggested by the Law …

I recall some of the many fights I got into as a child growing up in the early 1960s in what was once considered “the country.” Many of these fights occurred near the “standpipe” where we fought over whose turn it was to full our buckets and pitch-oil tins. Those …