In 2001, Enron—named the ‘most innovative company ’ by Fortune magazine for six consecutive years—collapsed. Enron’s chairman and chief executive officer, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, were two arrogant and belligerent men who believed they were the ‘smartest guys in the room’. They believed that, through their sheer cleverness and …
Read More »Thompson sees seventh heaven despite deficit, imminent Property Tax and RATT
The budget presented by the Honourable Colm Imbert, minister of finance in the current PNM administration, is his seventh such offering. Not for the first time, he has offered the country a deficit budget, to the tune of $TT9.096 billion, resulting from expenditure in the sum of $TT52.429b and revenue …
Read More »MSJ: T&T Budget should reveal vision for our country and the society we want for our children
“[…] Many people do not believe that their lives will be better as a result of the Budget… An MSJ Budget would have been structured so that the man and woman on the street could understand, follow, see where we are and see where we are going and feel how …
Read More »Dear Editor: What Imbert’s new SME proposal may reveal about political behaviour
“[…] So many workers are already under pressure from employers who do not remit their contributions and now, instead of encouraging the NIB to vigorously pursue employers who engage in this criminal act, the government is telling them it’s okay to leave workers unprotected when they have need to access …
Read More »Demming: Will Imbert’s bottled water move make T&T the Caribbean’s laughing stock?
A friend from up the Caribbean laughed at me on Monday evening and, unable to find any sensible defence, I was terribly embarrassed. Making bottled water exempt from VAT, she remarked with a loud chuckle, is ‘a level of worldliness which only you Trinis understand’. Eight of our Caribbean neighbours …
Read More »Noble: Faced with ‘a right-wing coup’ involving the PolSC, the CoP and the AG, someone had to act
The drama surrounding the contract of the Commissioner of Police reveals our nation’s values, tests the strength of the commitment we make to our institutions, and shapes the character of our country. We take our democracy for granted and point to the 1990 attempted coup as a sure sign of …
Read More »Tye: T&T’s governance model ‘breeds deep mistrust’—as such, ‘forced vaccinations’ would be a mistake
I certainly empathise with the government as they are navigating difficult decisions in the management of the economy and society during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, the issues facing the society are mostly not due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but deeper social issues that have never been properly addressed by …
Read More »‘The numbers don’t add up’: Dr Farrell on Covid, costs, challenges and consequences
“[…] Non-energy revenues have fallen in 2020-2021 and for next fiscal, 2021-2022, it is going to be worse—partly because people pay taxes on the previous year’s numbers and partly because the recovery is going to be slower than expected because of the state of emergency and the impact of the …
Read More »Noble: Trying a thing like a Trini; the problem with our pension plan
There is a quintessential Trini way to do business: we have enough of a façade to look professional, but we do things by vaps while the professionals stew silently. This tendency puts us into a weird space where the principals can vehemently protest that they follow the ‘science’. Meanwhile, the …
Read More »Daly Bread: In the interest of accountability—on spikes and vaccines
Dr Roshan Parasram, chief medical officer (CMO), and Dr Avery Hinds, technical director epidemiology, are trusted persons. I have said so more than once. It is from the facts, truth and science which they respectively deliver that I may raise issues about the government’s management of the pandemic. The issue …
Read More »Dear Editor: Working people must organise to stop pension cuts
“[…] Thousands have been retrenched, with more losing their livelihoods every day. Thousands can’t get a salary increase for more than eight years now. Prices going through the roof. And to rub salt in the wound of working people, they proposing to cut our NIS pension. This is how working-class …
Read More »Dear Editor: Government spinning Anansi stories to suppress workers’ wages
“[…] Minister Imbert has […] set the stage for entrenching the austerity programme the IMF has long been advising: privatisation, deregulation, the reduction of the public sector, wage suppression. “This austerity, of course, involves the weakening of the trade unions through the hiving off of the health sector, a de …
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